HSI Implementation & Evaluation Project: The North Star Program: A study of mentoring online, non-traditonal, underrepresented STEM students

The Chicago School Of Professional Psychology, Chicago IL

Investigators

Abstract

With the support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2 project aims to develop an online near-peer mentoring program to provide academic and social support to increase student persistence and completion. Based on previous literature and The Chicago School of Professional Psychology (TCSPP) institutional research data, it is posited that undergraduates who are online, non-traditional, and first-generation college students enter their program with low levels of self-efficacy, lacking a sense of belonging in an academic setting. Historically, these students have lower college persistence and completion levels than their on-campus, traditional-aged peers. We seek to study whether a connection to near-peer graduate students with similar demographic traits and lived experiences will break their isolation and increase their sense of belonging and self-efficacy. While the demand for and pursuit of online education, along with subsequent challenges to student persistence and completion, has grown significantly since the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a dearth of research specifically focused on online students and virtual mentoring. The North Star Project will provide students with directed one-on-one support from their near peers who have completed similar academic programs. Specifically, the project will engage students enrolled in the Master of Psychology degree as mentors to provide social support to increase Bachelor of Psychology student persistence and completion. Expected outcomes include increased student sense of belonging and self-efficacy in their degree program, resulting in increased rates of persistence, completion, and entry to graduate study. Through analysis of pre/post-self-efficacy and sense of belonging measurements, mentor and mentee feedback, academic performance, and persistence data, the project will advance knowledge of how mentoring of non-traditional-aged, online students affects their persistence, completion, and pursuit of graduate study in psychology. This research will provide new insights into methods of building a sense of belonging and self-efficacy in this growing population of students and the differences in the effectiveness of this intervention on campus-based versus fully online students. The research questions to be explored are: does near-peer mentoring enhance an online student’s sense of belonging and self-efficacy in a degree program? Does near-peer mentoring increase online student fall-to-fall persistence? And does a near-peer mentoring program increase degree completion and pursuit of graduate study? Previous work in this area has focused on traditional-aged students in physical sciences on residential campuses. This project has the potential to diversify psychological research, providing a shared, lived experience perspective from non-traditional students to advance the field. Their increased persistence, completion, and entry into graduate study will increase the range of perspectives in psychological scientific research and other STEM fields. 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.