A Synthesis of Social Science Research About the Relationship of K-12 Race, SES, and Immigrant Status School Diversity to Two- and Four-Year College STEM Outcomes

University Of North Carolina At Charlotte, Charlotte NC

Investigators

Abstract

This proposal was submitted in response to EHR Core Research (ECR) program announcement NSF 15-509. As part of ECR, this project is funded by the Research on Gender in Science and Engineering (GSE) program. GSE seeks to understand and address gender-based differences in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and workforce participation through education and implementation research that will lead to a larger and more diverse domestic STEM workforce. The proposed research will support the survey and synthesis of the social, educational, and behavioral science literatures regarding the relationship of K-12 diversity to STEM outcomes in two and four-year colleges. Findings from the resulting narrative syntheses, vote-counting and meta-regression analyses will contribute to enhancing the educational infrastructure necessary to diminish gaps in US students' STEM performance and developing a globally competitive STEM workforce. Gaining insight into trajectories to college STEM success among underserved populations is particularly important because youths from these backgrounds continue to lag in their participation in STEM and they are growing as a percent of the US student population. The results of these syntheses will promote learning in STEM, the narrowing of many extant K-16 gaps in STEM outcomes, the improvement of articulation agreements between community colleges and four-year institutions so that transfer students are more likely to succeed in STEM once they matriculate to the latter, and the preparation of students as productive workers in the globalizing economy. It will also stimulate future research by developing a theoretical model of K-12 diversity's mechanisms with respect to two- and four-year college STEM outcomes. Most basic research and policy studies about college STEM outcomes investigate the roles of student, family, and teacher characteristics, or the influences of pedagogy and curricula on STEM outcomes. This study will focus on the organizational characteristics of K-12 schools and classrooms in conjunction with the former set of factors. The syntheses have the potential to illuminate the relationship of variations in organizational characteristics of K-12 schools on college STEM outcomes, especially among underserved student populations. First, the syntheses will summarize the relationship of race/ethnic, socio-economic status, and immigrant diversity in K-12 schools and classrooms to STEM outcomes in higher education, paying attention to variations in the relationships by student subpopulations. Second, the researchers will investigate higher education outcomes at both two- and four-year institutions, and the transitions to them, and thereby capture the dynamics of the full STEM educational pipeline, particularly given the critical role of community college transfer options for underserved college students. The focus on two-year institutions is important due to the growing interest in how community colleges can contribute to creating a larger pool of STEM workers. Third, the study will identify and synthesize research about populations currently insufficiently discussed in the literature: Latinos/as, Asians, immigrants, and low-income students. Fourth, the syntheses will permit the development of a much-needed testable theoretical model that accounts for school and classroom compositional effects on STEM outcomes in two- and four-year colleges for all student populations. Finally, the results of this project will be a public resource that could contribute to the advancement of STEM teaching, learning, and participation, through the Spivack Archive, an extant searchable electronic database that presently holds abstracts of 550 research studies about the relationship of K-12 socio-economic status and racial composition to K-12 outcomes. The award will enable the researchers to add studies of higher education outcomes related to STEM to this archive.