NSF Award
2422358
The project will support the goals of a) advancing the field of STEM education through helping to identify factors that support or hinder the persistence of undergraduate students in STEM and b) building the PI’s research capacity in statistical modeling. To achieve these goals, the PI will complete statistical courses and work with a mentor team to be able to build complex statistical models that explicitly incorporate, rather than ignore, variables related to individuals’ experiences and backgrounds into statistical modeling. This is important because otherwise it can be easy to focus on factors related to the most common participant experiences, rather than capturing the breadth of participant experiences. Important persistence factors may not be identifiable if variables related to experiences and background are not included in models. The PI will use data collected by the non-profit Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) about the experiences of undergraduate students as they enter and graduate from college, as well as institutional characteristics. These models will provide information about the underlying factors that may influence the differences in the persistence of students in different STEM and non-STEM fields, addressing a significant and fundamental issue in STEM education research. In 2015–2019, HERI increased the breadth of their data collection, thus the PI is situated to make key contributions through analyzing this expanded dataset across several cohorts of students. This research will seek to a) help advance the field of STEM education through furthering understanding of the factors that influence student persistence in STEM and provide pathways for positive change; and b) positively impact STEM fields and benefit society through identifying ways to increase STEM persistence by addressing gaps in persistence. <br/><br/>The goals of this project are a) capacity-building in statistical modeling for the PI, and b) knowledge-building about factors influencing student persistence in STEM. To build research capacity the PI will complete statistical coursework and work with a mentor team, which will allow the PI to use Hierarchical General Linear Models and Structural Equation Modeling in analyses of the U.S.-wide data from HERI, specifically the Freshman, College Senior, Staff, and Faculty Survey data collected from 2015-2023. These analyses will include variables such as student GPA, academic preparation, academic behaviors, sense of belonging, values, and personal experiences as well as institutional characteristics. The project will uniquely contribute to knowledge about the factors that predict student persistence in STEM by investigating several complementary threads. First, is to compare student persistence across categories of fields of study (e.g. business, English, life sciences, physical sciences), to help understand patterns of persistence relating to characteristics of different fields. Second, is to draw across student, faculty, and staff perceptions of institutional climate, which will provide perspectives on how well aligned these perceptions are within an institution. Third, is to integrate a range of carefully selected variables that characterize student experiences prior to and during their time as undergraduate students, as facilitated by the expanded variables that HERI began collecting within the last decade. Fourth, is to use effect codes for categorical variables with three or more categories instead of indicator variables, which allows all individual subgroups to be compared to the overall group mean, rather than using a reference group. This four-pronged approach will allow the PI to contribute knowledge by identifying leverage points for increasing student persistence in STEM related to specific subsets of student experience and student and institutional characteristics, which would be otherwise unidentifiable. The project is supported by NSF’s EDU Core Research Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (ECR: BCSER) program, which is designed to build investigators’ capacity to carry out high-quality STEM education research.<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.
