Little Big Horn College TCUP Implementation Grant

Little Big Horn College, Crow Agency MT

Investigators

Abstract

Abstract Little Big Horn College's Mission with this endeavor is to significantly improve our recruitment and retention of STEM majors, provide them with an excellent education and career skills, double the number of our STEM majors who graduate or transfer on into four year institutions, and assist them in making a successful transition to bachelor's degree program or into the workforce, so that they succeed in achieving their educational and professional goals in STEM fields. Greater infusion of technology throughout the STEM curriculum will be a major tool for accomplishing our goals. To improve retention, our STEM Student Advisor will support and advise STEM students in navigating LBHC; supervise them in jobs as peer tutors and community workers; lead "Bridge" visits to transfer campuses, coordinate the Honors Academy and, overall, will be committed to their success. We believe that solid academic preparation, informed by good advising, is also critical to our STEM students' success. We will have an active program of course and curriculum revision, based on current research in Native American education, which gives priority to revising bottleneck courses, and develops our new forestry curriculum as well as courses which "round out" our current STEM degree programs. We will invest in the professional development of STEM faculty, both in discipline and in pedagogy. With the Center for Learning and Teaching in the West (CLTW), will host an annual STEM education research conference, emphasizing Indian education, for our STEM faculty and area teachers to learn and to share ideas and materials. To promote high student engagement in science courses, we will increase field and lab activities, and add residential field camps for incoming freshmen and for sophomores. Peer tutoring will support students in improving their academic performance. Financial incentives help retain students; STEM majors will have competitive opportunities to tutor or perform community service work; and will be assisted in identifying and applying for external scholarships, summer internships, research opportunities, and relevant summer jobs. These training opportunities will be another avenue for active learning, and will help students develop valuable job skills and/or an appreciation for research. How can the infusion of technology help our students to succeed? We.ll use technology to improve communication, e.g., by adding course information to the LBHC website, along with a database of scholarship and internship opportunities. Students will be given the option of computer assisted instruction for their lower level math courses. STEM students will have every opportunity to develop the technical skills they will need: in addition to the required I.S. course (3 cr.), we will develop 1-2 cr. courses in GPS, scientific presentations, graphing calculators and information literacy. A variety of upper level courses will have assignments that will require students to use their technology skills. We will also use CD-ROMs and Smartboards to enhance instruction. In order to accomplish these technology infusion objectives, we will upgrade and expand our technology infrastructure, and provide training and technical support to our faculty in the use of educational technology. Finally, we will ensure the effectiveness of this TCUP endeavor through excellent project management, including collaborative planning, effective evaluation, broad dissemination of results and attention to long term sustainability, and with the guidance of an external Advisory Committee. Broader Impacts: LBHC serves a 98% Native American student body. Since we expanded our I.T. curricula and added natural resource and environmental science (NR/ES) degree programs in 1996, our alumni have gone on to double the number of Crow Tribal professionals in NR/ES and IT fields. They are beginning to expand the sense of what is possible for students who are coming up behind them; we are seeing and feeling a significant ground swell of interest in these career fields, as well as the first small cohort of math/engineering majors. The broader impact of this project will be to support, sustain and expand this movement towards careers in STEM fields among our Crow and other Native American students. Our alumni are starting to bring their skills back to our community, working for the Tribe and LBHC, and are also changing the region, e.g., by diversifying the professional staffs of BLM and BOR. In addition, we are building relationships between LBHC, our area teachers, and CLTW. With CLTW.s assistance we plan to offer area teachers the option of taking our STEM short courses for graduate credit, and will open our annual STEM educational research conference to them as well as to our STEM majors and pre-service teachers. We are working to create a future in which our Crow children are learning from Crow STEM teachers, and have Crow role models in STEM professions. Although each Tribe is unique, what we learn here will likely be useful to other Tribal Colleges, and perhaps also to other colleges and universities with significant Native American enrollment. These audiences will be the focus of our dissemination efforts.. Intellectual Merit: This project addresses a significant nation wide shortage of Native American STEM professionals, and takes an innovative, integrated approach towards increasing the numbers and improving the preparation of TC STEM graduates. The piloting of computer assisted instruction (CAI) in TC math courses, the integration of traditional ecological knowledge into TC science courses, collaboration with our regional CLTW, and the use of DACUMs for TC curriculum development are all innovative project components - which will advance our knowledge and understanding of effectively educating TC STEM majors. The Project leadership & STEM faculty bring many years of TC teaching and program administration experience to this project, including managing earlier LBHC grants for STEM curriculum development, faculty development, undergraduate research & scholarships.