Capacity-Building Workshops for Competitive S-STEM Proposals from Two-Year Colleges in the Western U.S.

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The NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) program supports the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need. It accomplishes this goal by funding two-year and four-year institutions of higher education, that use these funds to give scholarships and academic support to undergraduate STEM students pursuing associate-, bachelor-, or master-level STEM degrees. Increasing the ability of two-year colleges to obtain S-STEM funding would increase participation of students served by these colleges. To this end, this project will provide two annual capacity-building workshops focused on preparing competitive proposals for submission to the S-STEM program for 24 teams from two-year colleges. The specific focus will be on developing proposals for submission to the Institutional Capacity Building track of the S-STEM program. Each participating two-year college will send a two-person team composed of the STEM faculty member who will serve as the principal investigator of the proposal and a STEM administrator or education researcher. It is expected that working in these teams can improve proposal quality, increase the number of S-STEM grants to two year colleges, and most importantly, add new students to pathways toward becoming STEM professionals.The workshops will be held in the western United States. Recruitment will be conducted through venues such as associations for two-year colleges (e.g., American Association of Community Colleges), and discipline-specific associations. The two-and-a-half day workshops will feature experts in different areas to advise community college personnel, and provide time for the team to work together on the proposal. Prior to the workshop, the participants will interview stakeholders to better understand their institution's needs and resources, thus building the framework for their proposal's activities and budget. Research and evaluation of the workshop's effectiveness will measure participants' experiences at the workshop and their subsequent work to develop their proposal. This information will provide insight into the constraints and affordances that workshop participants face in applying what they learned at the workshop to build capacity for research at two-year institutions.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.