Collaborative Research: Florida-Caribbean Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence

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The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program assists universities and colleges in diversifying the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) workforce through their efforts at significantly increasing the numbers of students from historically underrepresented minority populations (African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, American Indians or Alaska Natives, Native Hawaiians or Other Pacific Islanders) to successfully complete high quality degree programs in STEM. Louis Stokes Regional Centers of Excellence in Broadening Participation (LSRCEs) are designed to serve as regional testbeds for outreach, knowledge-generating and diffusion activities or other activities that contribute to successful practices in STEM education. LSRCE activities may also be concentrated in the development of disciplinary research institutes.Santa Fe College, a two-year institution and the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), a historically black university (HBCU) will implement activities of the Florida-Caribbean Louis Stokes Regional Center of Excellence in Broadening Participation (FL-C LSRCE), in conjunction with Columbia University and the Stanford Interventions Lab, Stanford University over the next three years. Administrators and faculty from several LSAMP projects, including the Florida-Georgia and University of Puerto Rico and Alabama alliances will participate as implementers of the research to practice activities and serve as consultants to the center. A practitioner/researcher collaboration, utilizing powerful psychosocial interventions to enhance social-emotional skills, is vital for college success. The FL-C LSRCE will enhance the success of students from traditionally underrepresented minority populations in STEM by developing, testing and disseminating intervention practices to reduce the impact of stereotype threat and enhance growth mindset in the face of academic challenges.Center activities will include: (1) hosting an annual conference on psychosocial interventions that provides faculty access to the research-based STEM-focused interventions and training on the importance of faculty feedback andinteraction on student success; (2) utilizing the STEM-Central hub (https://stem-central.net/). This hub will feature presentations on the impact of interventions at participating institutions and webinars that spotlight successful interventions in the K-20 STEM community to promote widespread dissemination of successful work. (3) Objective 3: provide internships for STEM faculty to increase their research expertise; (4) Conduct rigorous assessment on the interventions to meet standards for publication in peer-reviewed journals, and (5) assist participating institutions in data analysis and interpretation.This LSRCE builds on the success of UVIs NSF funded Historically Black Colleges and Universities-Undergraduate Program's Achieving Competitive Excellence (ACE) Implementation Project, the UVI Growth Model, integrating growth mindset training into the STEM undergraduate programming and Santa Fe College's NSF-funded IUSE projects in geosciences.Through existing collaborations with the Stanford University Interventions Lab and the Lab of Intergroup Relations and the Social Mind at Columbia University, the FL-C LSRCE will develop easily deployed STEM mindset interventions and training on the impact of STEM faculty feedback on student mindset. The comprehensive evaluation findings and interventions will be widely disseminated through the STEM Central portal, AAAS Open Forum portal and other collaborative STEM networking platforms, the institutions' websites and other venues (conference presentations and production of scholarly research).This award is co-funded by NSF INCLUDES which focuses on catalyzing the STEM enterprise to collaboratively work for inclusive change.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.