NSF Award
2220844
This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Idaho State University. Over its 6-year duration, this project will provide scholarships to 36-45 different full-time transfer students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in Biology, Microbiology, Biochemistry, or Chemistry (BMBC). Four cohorts of scholars will receive up to two and a half years of scholarship support. To facilitate degree completion and transition to the STEM workforce, scholarship support will be coupled with other supports to structure scholars’ authentic participation in a multidisciplinary research community over time, including a research exploration course to highlight multidisciplinary strategies to diverse BMBC research problems, an undergraduate research experience, faculty and peer mentoring structures to promote scholars’ sense of belonging in the BMBC research community, and connections to post-graduation workforce and graduate program placement. This project has the potential to improve the STEM workforce by preparing scientist leaders for multidisciplinary teams who can identify emerging research areas and devise innovative solutions to problems across the biology-chemistry interface. <br/><br/>The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The specific objectives of this project are to provide scholarships to students transferring to a BMBC major at Idaho State University, improve transfer student retention and on-time graduation, and train scientist leaders of multidisciplinary teams. Transfer students face the specific challenge of transitioning to a new academic space with limited time to author their identities in relation to that space, which is important for student persistence in a discipline. To address this challenge, this project will draw on evidence-based approaches from two frameworks: communities of science practice and disciplinary identity. The project activities will be designed to support transfer students to author their multidisciplinary identities through participation in the BMBC community of science practice. This project has the potential to advance understanding of the effectiveness of these evidence-based approaches in this context for transfer student retention and graduation in BMBC majors and transition to the STEM workforce or graduate programs. The project will be evaluated based on the analysis of institutional data, scholar surveys, scholar focus group interviews, and faculty surveys. An external evaluator will conduct yearly formative assessment and a summative assessment at the end of the project to assess how the project meets the objectives. Results of this project will be disseminated through presentations at regional and national conferences, peer-reviewed publications, a dedicated section on the university website, university presentations, and department seminars. This project is funded by NSF’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.<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.
