UWM STEM CELL: An integrated approach to improve early college STEM education outcomes

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UWM STEM CELL is a pilot project to address pedagogical and sociocultural issues that contribute to the lack of persistence and the flow of talented and interested students away from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors at the early-career undergraduate level. Many aspirational STEM students lack the cultural knowledge about how to operate successfully in a university setting, have little idea what a STEM career entails, and have academic backgrounds that are deficient. STEM CELL will fundamentally reorient the institutional culture from an attrition model to one that is focused on student outcomes emphasizing STEM persistence, learning, enthusiasm and informed decision making. The project will sustain students in need of academic support, provide individualized guidance regarding STEM major and career choices, and immerse students in practical, integrative, early academic career experiences to help inform their chosen fields of study and career paths. The project will accomplish its goals through the comprehensive application of a suite of low-cost, high-impact interventions, including intentional course alignment across disciplinary boundaries among courses in mathematics, chemistry, and biology, implementation of active learning modes of pedagogy, development of a learning community with integrated academic and social supports, and explicit attention to issues of relevance including the construction of a dynamic individual development plan. This comprehensive intervention will be rigorously evaluated and tested by a randomized trial, with the intervention explicitly co-planned alongside the evaluation design. This evaluation will provide unambiguous information regarding the effectiveness of this scalable, sustainable comprehensive intervention and thus will be relevant to institutions of higher education nationwide.