NSF Award
2314994
This project aims to serve the national interest by helping engineering and computing students to thrive, rather than just attain good grades. This has the potential to retain more students in engineering and improve their graduation rate. Thriving students actively pursue the twin goals of ‘doing well’ and ‘feeling good’ as part of their education. This project aspires to begin transforming the culture of engineering education from one in which students strive solely to succeed academically (the ‘doing well’) to one in which they also seek wellbeing. Achieving this goal would lead to a culture of thriving among engineering and computing students that does not currently exist. Students can do this by learning and adopting thriving competencies – skills, behaviors and beliefs – to boost the ‘feeling good’ part of thriving. This project aims to develop a series of competency-based interventions to improve, for example, engineering identity, belongingness, gratitude, mindfulness, mindset and stress management, and to test their efficacy. Achieving the project goals will advance the understanding of the role of thriving in engineering education and its impact on graduating more engineers to meet the nation’s needs.<br/><br/>This project builds on what is known about noncognitive and affective factors – factors not related to talent or intelligence but are proven to be powerfully associated with academic success, sometimes in nonintuitive ways. The project team will execute a well-designed plan to develop, test and deploy thriving competencies through mobile applications (or ‘apps’), classroom-based activities, and extracurricular or club activities. The deployment scheme for each competency will be guided by prior research on effective interventions and supported by evidence. The plan will also include partnering with both academic and Student Affairs units at the test school and will gather data to measure the efficacy of various initiatives through direct quantitative measures using survey instruments and sound analytical methods. Finally, the project evaluation will include student interviews to determine whether students have adopted the thriving competencies into their educational toolset. The broader impacts of this project are achieved in two ways. First, this project will work with underserved students, defined as underrepresented minority, first-generation or low-income students. This choice addresses historic educational inequities and ensures that these students are served. Second, this project will disseminate the successful parts of the project to additional partner schools to test the efficacy of the initiatives more widely and in diverse educational contexts. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.<br/><br/>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.
