Louis Stokes STEM Pathways and Research Alliance: North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation

North Carolina Agricultural & Technical State University, Greensboro NC

Investigators

Abstract

The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program assists universities and colleges in diversifying the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce through their efforts at significantly increasing the numbers of students from historically underrepresented minority populations (African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians or Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders) to successfully complete high quality degree programs in STEM. The North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (NCLSAMP) project proposes to utilize "promising practices" as well as new program initiatives to achieve the following goals: 1) Increase the pool of competent underrepresented graduates with STEM bachelor's degrees; 2) Promote retention and baccalaureate degree attainment in STEM academic programs, and; 3) Increase the number of students who matriculate into STEM graduate programs. The NCLSAMP STEM Pathways and Research Alliance project's expected outcomes at the end of the project are to (1) maintain an overall retention rate of seventy-five percent (75%) of program participants in STEM baccalaureate programs within the Alliance; (2) increase by 10% the pool of competent historically underrepresented minority graduates with STEM bachelor's degrees; and, (3) increase by 10% the number of NCLSAMP participants who matriculate into STEM graduate programs. Building upon its successes in the implementation of cohort-based learning,collaborative instructional approaches and block-scheduling, the Alliance will help its members institutionalize and maintain high impact practices engaging a larger population of underrepresented students into STEM-learning communities. Best practices that will continue and expand include facilitated study groups, research skills development workshops, and mentored research experiences for undergraduates. A mixed methods study will be conducted by the University of North Carolina-Charlotte leveraging the NSF-funded Roots of STEM project. This project helps identify institutional factors that drive students away from STEM fields. The results of the study will be published in scholarly journals and disseminated broadly. 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.