CAREER: Multidimensional Support to Improve Distance Learning Experience in Community College STEM Gateway Courses

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In this CAREER award, the investigator will document teaching practices in online STEM courses at community colleges and promote effective practices for online teaching. This work is significant because community colleges are a key point of access to postsecondary STEM education for millions of low-income and ethnic minority students each year. Thus, community colleges play a critical role in the national STEM pipeline. Unfortunately, community colleges face many challenges, including space and faculty constraints and a large proportion of nontraditional college students who find it difficult to attend on-campus courses. Distance learning through fully online coursework is a promising approach to mitigating these barriers by enabling colleges to offer additional courses or course sections, thus increasing student access to and progression through required courses. This project aims to promote the effectiveness of distance learning in STEM gateway courses at community colleges through evidence-based intervention strategies and practices, with the ultimate goal of supporting improved student engagement and performance. The project has five specific objectives: (i) to document typical instructional approaches in online STEM gateway courses offered at community colleges; (ii) to identify promising intervention strategies with the potential to better support student engagement and learning in fully online coursework; iii) to evaluate the impacts of these strategies on student learning outcomes through rigorous randomized controlled trials; (iv) to understand the student experience of learning within online environments through investigation of learning behaviors and the ways in which an intervention strategy may influence these behaviors; and (v) to evaluate which intervention strategies reduce performance gaps in online courses between learners from less and more disadvantaged backgrounds. To achieve these objectives, two core studies will be conducted. The investigator will implement and evaluate two specific intervention strategies that have shown promising results in a four-year setting: skill scaffolding and increased interpersonal interaction. A descriptive study will systematically collect information on instructors' perceptions of distance learning and their instructional practices in a large swath of online STEM gateway courses in a large state community college system. Subsequently, the investigator will develop additional intervention strategies based on both theoretical recommendations and information collected from the descriptive study. An intervention study will conduct a series of random-assignment experiments. These experiments will assess the impacts of strategies for more effectively engaging and supporting students in online STEM gateway courses.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.