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 need at Somerset Community College, a two-year college in Appalachian Kentucky. Over its five-year duration, this project will provide scholarships to 30 unique full- and part-time students who are pursuing associate degrees in Biology, Physics, Chemistry, Mathematics, or Pre-Engineering. Scholars will be admitted in three cohorts and receive two-year (first year students) or one year (transfer students) scholarships. The project aims to improve the retention and graduation of STEM students by creating close-knit cohorts of students in a Science, Technology, Engineering, STEM-contextualized Arts, and Mathematics (STEAM) learning community. This learning community will provide general education instruction, co-curricular activities, and mentoring by STEM faculty. Recruitment for the project will focus on inclusion of groups tat are under-represented in STEM fields, including veterans, women, minorities, disabled, and non-traditional students. To increase the effectiveness of the project, the College has partnered with STEM-related businesses and STEM faculty at other institutions from which or to which many of the College’s students transfer. The project is designed to extend its impact to include the Scholars' families and communities. The project aims to improve the educational attainment, especially in STEM fields, of students from south-central Kentucky. Lessons learned from the project will include knowledge about strategies to improve success in STEM education, particularly in rural, under-resourced communities.
The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Project aims are to: (1) improve Scholars’ retention and graduation; (2) implement effective evidence-based strategies; and (3) research the effectiveness of the implemented strategies. The project's research plan will add to the knowledge base on effective strategies to improve the success of community college STEM students from rural, under-resourced communities. This research will investigate the effects of project activities on increasing Scholars’ academic success, persistence, retention, completion, transfer of learning, and employment rates compared to non-Scholars and historical students who would have qualified to be in the S-STEM cohort. Data will be collected and analyzed to determine which strategies aided student success. This data will also be correlated with participant demographics to assess the effectiveness of project activities for supporting different demographic groups. The project has the potential to advance understanding of the effectiveness of faculty mentoring and STEAM Learning Communities on rural, low-income college STEM students. The results of this project will be disseminated widely by sharing lessons learned with higher education and industry project partners, and in national educational journals and conferences. 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.
