A Knowledge Management Resource Center for the Historically Black Colleges and Universities – Undergraduate Program

Association Of American Colleges And Universities, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities - Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) is committed to enhancing the quality of undergraduate STEM education and research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) in order to broaden participation in the nation's STEM workforce. Accordingly, HBCU-UP supports the project from the American Association of Colleges and Universities, which seeks to develop and deploy a Knowledge Management Resource Center. For 25 years, HBCU-UP has served as a national exemplar in building and supporting the human and structural capacity of HBCUs to broaden the participation of minoritized students in STEM. However, efforts to disseminate the program’s lessons learned are complicated by a myriad of contextual and nuanced challenges. The HBCU-UP Knowledge Management Resource Center (KMRC) aims to mitigate these challenges by 1) capturing the broadening participation knowledge of the HBCU-UP stakeholder community, 2) transferring that knowledge to mainstreamed undergraduate STEM reform communities without sacrificing meaning, and 3) positioning the HBCU-UP stakeholder community to gain more knowledge. Specifically, the KMRC will utilize a culturally responsive, values-engaged approach to assess the NSF HBCU-UP award portfolio, requiring both qualitative content analysis strategies and quantitative tests of significance to determine the effectiveness of the overall HBCU-UP award portfolio. By integrating Cultural Historical Activity Theory (CHAT), an evaluative research framework based in systems thinking, the KMRC will offer a deeper understanding of not only what about HBCU-UP broadening participation interventions works, but for whom, and under what circumstances they work best. Overall, the work of the KMRC has the potential to establish a foundation of commonly known and accepted metrics that are HBCU community-sanctioned and culturally and contextually appropriate for assessing, interpreting, and adapting the broadening participation impact the HBCU-UP award portfolio. Ultimately, this creates an intellectual space for curating, disseminating, and transferring the cutting-edge innovations in broadening participation occurring at HBCUs to a national audience of STEM reformers from all institution types. By ensuring that the HBCU broadening participation knowledge base is known and understood both within and outside of the HBCU community, our national agenda for a diverse, competitively trained, and liberally educated STEM workforce is mobilized and accelerated. 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.