Louis Stokes Regional Centers of Excellence in Broadening Participation

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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 (LSRCE) 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.Developing a stronger, more diverse STEM workforce is a clear national need to promote economic prosperity and maintain global leadership in science. Work toward that end is in accord with the National Science Foundation's mission to promote the progress of science. Since 2004, the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's to PhD Bridge Program has broadened participation in STEM through identifying and promoting talent from historically underrepresented or underserved groups. To date, bridge program participants have earned over 80 Master's degrees and 29 PhDs. Of note, the retention rate to the PhD for the bridge program is 83% and 90% for the 8-year PhD completion rate, well above the national averages. The broad goal of the Fisk University LSRCE work is to generate new knowledge about best practices to promote broadening participation that can be disseminated on a regional and national scale. The Center have three objectives: 1) Build on their current publicly available toolkit to create a more comprehensive guide detailing the theory and research underlying the tools; 2) Research the effectiveness of program activities and create tools for internal evaluation and data collection that can be widely disseminated to the higher education community; and 3) Host a regional workshop focused on identifying best practices from other local institutions, disseminate the theory and tools from the Fisk-Vanderbilt Master's to PhD Bridge Program guide, and connect practitioners with researchers. The fundamental approach that the Center is taking to achieve these objectives is to develop a relationship with social scientists and educational researchers at the Vanderbilt Peabody School of Education and the American Institutes for Research. Fisk University LSRCE seek to better explain the science of broadening participation, to advance understanding of best practices and simultaneously develop tools to ease the implementation of activities and interventions that promote the development of a more diverse STEM workforce. The Center's work will be disseminated to the larger scientific community to promote adoption of these practices to the benefit of our nation.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.