This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial at Morgan State University, the largest Historically Black College and University in Maryland. Over its five-year duration, this project will provide scholarships to 30 undergraduate Scholars who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and/or Physics. First-year students will receive up to four years and transfer students will receive up to two-years of scholarship support. The project aims to increase student persistence in STEM fields by linking scholarships with effective supporting activities, including mentoring, undergraduate research experiences, service learning, outreach projects, graduate school preparation, and participation in discipline-specific conferences. With the help of mentors, the Scholars will create Individual Development Plans outlining their career goals and describing the steps needed to achieve those goals. The project will also support curriculum improvements aimed at improving overall first-year student retention in STEM. The project seeks to shape the University’s best practices into a model that may be implemented across the nation. To this end, the project will generate new knowledge about how Tinto’s persistence model can be used to understand the kinds of activities that improve self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and perception of STEM curricula, particularly for African American STEM students. These three factors influence student motivation, which in turn influences persistence. Because the University has a student population that is more than 80% African American, this project has the potential to broaden participation in STEM fields and to reveal how mentoring and individual development plans may support retention and graduation of African American undergraduates in STEM.
The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. A specific goal of the project is to increase understanding about how project activities affect Scholars’ success, motivation, and persistence in STEM disciplines and careers. Research on persistence models for African American students is scarce. This project aims to help fill this research gap by addressing three research questions: (a) How do the project activities impact African American STEM Scholars’ self-efficacy, sense of belonging, and perception of the STEM curriculum? (b) What is the impact on the project on Scholars’ persistence in STEM disciplines? and (c) How do Scholars characterize the elements of the program that positively impact their goals, motivation, and persistence in STEM disciplines and careers? This project couples Tinto’s persistence theory model with the University’s best practices in math preparation, active learning, block scheduling, and undergraduate research. The major expected outcome of the project is to develop an HBCU STEM framework that leverages university experiences to enhance student motivation, thus leading to increased persistence. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
