EDUCATIONAL SYSTEMS: Settings Yielding Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math Success (ED-SYSTEMS)

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Community colleges and Minority Serving Institutions, including Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs), provide several pathways and linkages to the STEM pipeline and are key access points to postsecondary education for underrepresented racial minorities (URM), specifically African Americans, American Indians, and Latinos. Student mobility and transitions across institutions are key factors to consider in assessing STEM degree pathways. This study seeks to examine STEM pathways for students who begin at community colleges, with a specific emphasis on URM students, student mobility across multiple institutions, and the role of HSIs. The research findings will provide a better understanding of how to assess STEM outcomes and hold potential to transform the structure and processes that underlie STEM postsecondary trajectories to promote racial equity and broaden participation in STEM.An integrated mixed methods approach utilizing multiple membership random effect modeling, social network analysis, and digital narratives, with both national and regional data, will provide a fine-grained and nuanced examination of the barriers and opportunities to STEM presented by individual characteristics and institutional contexts for URM students who may navigate STEM pathways across several institutions. The following research purposes will be addressed: 1) identify STEM student mobility patterns, showing the links between institutions and how these links impact students, 2) utilize advanced statistical techniques that account for student mobility across colleges to examine the student characteristics, college experiences, and institutional contexts that contribute to STEM outcomes, and 3) qualitatively deepen and clarify findings from the large scale data analysis to generate insights on students lived experiences.