IEP:HSI: Family Centered Innovations

The University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Edinburg TX

Investigators

Abstract

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2 project aims to improve teaching and learning experiences in introductory mathematics courses. Despite decades of student-centered initiatives aimed to improve student success in introductory mathematics courses, these gateway keeper courses have kept Hispanics and other groups who are underrepresented in STEM in higher education. Traditional teaching and learning frameworks and practices in mathematics courses are, generally, not responsive to the students’ needs. The family-centered approach to teaching and learning will integrate the expertise of families from the community into the course curriculum to connect mathematical concepts to the life of the students and their families. The goal is to validate the students’ family ancestral knowledge, while making the course’s content more relevant. The project team will partner with A Vehicle of Engagement (AVE) Frontera family leaders to train mathematics faculty and provide them with the resources and support to implement a family-centered class project in their course. The family leaders will visit mathematics classrooms from the partner institution to inspire, motivate, and support students with their family-centered projects. The proposed project will utilize a novel Family-Centered Theory of Change with an intersectionality lens that can help HSI educational leaders reshape their university’s unique identity, so it reflects the students and families they serve. The project benefits from the relational partnership between leaders from an institution of higher education and leaders from a community-based organization. The community partners’ focus on family and education makes them an ideal partner to help HSIs promote the advancement of underrepresented groups in STEM, build institutional-community transformative partnerships, and broaden participation in STEM at HSIs. The proposed project has the potential to shed new light on the sense of belonging among Hispanic students and their families and other underrepresented communities in STEM, if the number of sites is increased. The researchers are particularly interested in first year students and their transition into the second and third years in college. To assess the impact of the revised introductory mathematics courses, a quasi-experimental design with stratified random sampling and repeated measures will be used to determine if there is a statistically significant positive difference in the sense of belonging. The community partner will help broaden participation by creating a new support group that will serve families/groups that come from underrepresented regions. In addition, the data collected will be used to create a blueprint to recommend to upper administration the establishment of an Office for Family-Centered Innovations to support underrepresented communities at the local, state, and national levels. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. 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.