Undergraduate Research Experience At Community Colleges

Eastern Iowa Community College, Davenport IA

Investigators

Abstract

Community and tribal colleges are a critical source of future STEM workers from groups that are now underrepresented in STEM disciplines. To interest students at these institutions in STEM careers and to encourage persistence in STEM majors, it is important that they have authentic research experiences in the first few years of college. In this project, Eastern Iowa Community College will determine the effectiveness of undergraduate research courses as an avenue to give community college students authentic research experiences. The project will also develop a workshop for faculty from partner community and tribal colleges, to help them effectively develop and teach these research courses. Each of the six colleges in this partnership will develop a research course and associated case studies. The research topics will be centered in the local communities and involve the students in both gathering and analyzing data. As a result, the students will be authentically involved in doing research and the research topic will link to issues that are important to the students and their local communities. The courses will be designed in conjunction with articulation agreements between two- and four-year partner institutions. It is expected that the dissemination of the resulting courses and their evaluation will increase the entrance and persistence of students, including underrepresented minority students, in STEM fields. In addition, the project may help colleges to institutionalize new approaches to broadening the participation of underrepresented minorities in STEM fields. The findings of this project will be shared with other community colleges across the country through the project website, potentially contributing to national insights about inclusive pedagogy development. The educational research component of this grant will study the student experiences in these research courses to answer four questions: 1) How well does participating in research courses increase community college students' knowledge in the STEM disciplines? 2) How well does participating in research courses increase these students' interest in and engagement with STEM learning. 3) To what extent does participating in research courses increase community college students' motivation to complete a STEM degree? 4) How successful were the project's activities in reaching the targeted underrepresented minority students? Both the course materials and the research results will be disseminated broadly, particularly targeting other community colleges around the nation. Since community colleges have demographics that are usually more representative of the surrounding communities than four-year colleges, implementing these ideas should improve the fraction of underrepresented minorities in STEM disciplines around the nation. 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.