STEM MILES: Mentoring Innovative Learning Experiences for Students

Santa Rosa Junior College, Santa Rosa CA

Investigators

Abstract

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, the STEM MILES (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Mentoring Innovative Learning Experiences for Students) project is providing support to low-income students with demonstrated financial need and academic promise to succeed in STEM disciplines at Santa Rosa Junior College. This effort aims to improve the academic outcomes of low-income, academically talented STEM students by expanding the role that community college faculty play in advising and mentoring while pairing that role with financial support. Community college students will be provided with the high-touch, focused-faculty advising model, typically found at smaller private four-year institutions of higher education. Sixty low-income students majoring in Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Physics, Engineering, or Mathematics will be recruited, in three cohorts of twenty students over the grant life span. Led by an interdisciplinary team of STEM faculty at Santa Rosa Junior College, the STEM MILES project will provide interventions that develop students' scientific self-efficacy, identity, motivation, and values that are known to promote successful transfer to four-year institutions or completion of degrees in the STEM fields. To reinforce their sense of belonging to the scientific community and encourage their perseverance in STEM academic pathways, the MILES scholars will enroll in an interdisciplinary course on Critical Thinking in the Sciences and participate in co-curricular faculty mentoring. To enhance faculty-student collaborations within the STEM community, the scholars will participate in career exploration opportunities through networking, field trips, job shadowing events, career fairs, and internship opportunities. To foster scientific self-identity and self-efficacy, the students will select from a menu of professional development opportunities every semester, in order to gain experience with research, as well as build leadership and job skills. The evaluation and assessment of this project will inform the transformative process from traditional STEM instruction to specialized instruction. Formative assessment will track the experience of the scholars through the Program via end-of-semester checklists and surveys. The summative assessment will be done via questionnaires comparing students at the beginning versus the end of the program and the statistical analysis of student performance data against a baseline cohort. The underperformance of traditionally disadvantaged groups in the STEM fields is a well-documented phenomenon, and this project holds promise for providing a model that counteracts that underperformance. The MILES Program adds curricular components, a comprehensive system of faculty advising, and encourages the STEM departments to track data related to the progress and completion of STEM-related student pathways. The results of formative and summative assessments will be of interest to the increasing number of community colleges that are redesigning their academic programs to provide coherent pathways leading to improved student graduation and transfer.