Collaborative Research: Scaling the Early Research Scholars Program

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Enrollment in computer science (CS) programs across the nation is higher than ever, yet two critical problems persist. First, despite these high enrollments, relatively few U.S. students are continuing on to graduate school. Maintaining and improving the health of the domestic Ph.D. pipeline is a concern of universities, companies, and government agencies. Second, the population of students pursuing CS degrees is not representative of the diversity of people in the U.S., with women and other groups persistently underrepresented. The Early Research Scholars Program (ERSP) aims to address issues of increasing the Ph.D. pipeline and broadening participation in computer science fields. ERSP is an academic-year, team-based research apprenticeship program that places special emphasis on mentoring women and underrepresented groups in the second year of the CS major. ERSP's mentoring framework includes the research mentor and the ERSP central mentoring team, providing multifaceted support for each student. In addition, it is structured to engage a large number of early CS students in a productive, positive CS research experience without imposing undue work on individual research advisors. By engaging students in early research, ERSP aims to increase their retention at the undergraduate level and recruitment into graduate programs. The project has been running successfully at University of California San Diego for four years. This project will expand ERSP to other universities, including Stanford University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the University of Illinois at Chicago. The project will also study the outcomes of ERSP on the student and faculty participants at all institutions. This project has two parts: expansion of ERSP and evaluation of the impact of ERSP on participants. Initially, ERSP will be implemented at three research-intensive schools with a range of undergraduate admission criteria. Each implementation will be tailored to the specific context of the institution, providing a range of implementation structures as models for how ERSP might be successfully implemented. After this initial expansion phase, the project plans to partner with two additional schools to explore how ERSP could be implemented at less research-intensive universities (e.g., masters institutions). The second part of this project is research on the long-term impact of ERSP on student participants. Specifically, the project seeks to assess whether ERSP promotes the following among participants: a sense of connection with the computing community, short-term and long-term engagement in research, CS knowledge, and persistence in computing. Evaluators at the Center for Evaluating the Research Pipeline will use their national survey infrastructure to collect experiential data from ERSP students vs. non-ERSP students, as the students progress through college and after they leave college. These evaluators will also conduct interviews with ERSP program leaders, faculty mentors, and students, and control faculty and students who are not participating in ERSP. These interviews will supplement the survey data, and help the ERSP team better understand ERSP impact, as well as identify new challenges and opportunities for program improvement.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.