MCC STEM Scholarship Program

在美国国家科学基金会科学、技术、工程和数学奖学金（S-STEM）项目的资助下，麦克亨利县学院（MCC）将为追求和完成STEM学位的有学术天赋的低收入学生提供奖学金和基于证据的支持服务。这个项目的设计有三个目标。首先是增加攻读STEM学科的学生的多样性。二是提高MCC STEM学者的保留率和完成度。第三是了解项目活动和其他相关因素影响奖学金获得者的教育经历和成功的具体方式。为了实现这些目标，该项目的主要研究人员将开展一系列全面和系统的活动。这些活动将包括在有大量少数民族和低收入人口的地区高中开展现场推广和招生工作，开展旨在促进留校和学生成功的以个人和群体为基础的体验，以及在世纪挑战集团与大学研究人员之间的伙伴关系指导下开展的嵌入式知识创造工作。虽然社区大学拥有大量潜在的STEM人才，但需要更多的支持来确保他们能够将学生，特别是低收入家庭的学生，置于有前途的成功之路上。最近的证据表明，在支持学生方面，整体而非单一的方法对社区大学学生的保留和完成学业有更大的好处。与此同时，虽然研究已经证明了多种服务和支持对社区大学生成功的积极影响，但关于这些方法如何以及为什么起作用的确切证据仍然有限。探索这些努力可以帮助确定最有效的策略，以提高学生对STEM的坚持和完成度。该项目不仅整合了各种支持，以帮助社区大学生在STEM方面取得成功，特别是那些低收入和有学术天赋的学生，而且还研究了这些努力是如何起作用的以及为什么要这样做。从嵌入式研究、评估和评估中获得的经验知识将为小型（通常是资源不足的）社区学院提供有关如何调和和协调各种机构支持的信息，以及如何将具有成本效益的合作努力制度化和维持，以帮助有学术天赋的低收入STEM学生。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, McHenry County College (MCC) will provide scholarships and evidence-based support services to academically talented low-income students pursuing and completing STEM degrees. Three goals animate the design of this project. The first is to increase the diversity of students pursuing STEM disciplines. The second is to increase retention and completion of the MCC STEM Scholars. The third is to generate knowledge about specific ways project activities and other relevant factors influence the educational experiences and success of the scholarship recipients. Towards these goals the project's principal investigators will carry out a holistic and systematic range of activities. Such activities will include on-site outreach and recruitment efforts at area high schools with significant minority and low-income populations, on-going individual and cohort-based experiences designed to promote retention and student success, and embedded knowledge-generating efforts guided by a partnership between MCC and university researchers. Although community colleges possess a large pool of potential STEM talent, greater supports are needed to ensure that they can place their students on a promising path toward success, especially low-income students. Recent evidence has suggested that holistic, rather than singular approaches to student support offer greater benefits to community college student retention and completion. At the same time, while research has demonstrated the positive impact of multiple services and supports on community college student success, there remains limited evidence on precisely how and why such approaches work. Exploring such efforts can help identify the most effective strategies to improve student persistence and completion in STEM. This project not only integrates a variety of supports to assist community college students in succeeding in STEM, particularly those who are low-income and academically talented, but also examines how such efforts work and why. The empirical knowledge derived from the embedded research, assessment, and evaluation will inform small (and typically under-resourced) community colleges on how to reconcile and coordinate various institutional supports, as well as on how to institutionalize and sustain cost-effective, collaborative efforts to assist academically talented low-income STEM students.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.