Building Capacity: An Intervention to Improve Success of Biology Majors in Mathematics

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The Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (HSI Program) aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. This project at Los Angeles Mission College will advance the aims of the HSI Program by developing a student-centered intervention to support the success of undergraduate biology students. The project aims to increase the success of biology majors in their courses at Los Angeles Mission College and in transfer to four-year universities. This project plans to achieve these aims through weekly academic success workshops that help biology majors pass college algebra and trigonometry courses. This intervention is expected to stimulate student engagement in biology through mathematics, which will increase student success and retention in gateway mathematics courses and persistence in the major. The goals of this project are to increase the persistence, success, retention rates, and transfer rates of biology majors, with a focus on those in college algebra and trigonometry courses. By making the quantitative aspects of biology more engaging and relevant via academic success workshops, the project aims to increase student success and retention rates in college algebra and trigonometry. The academic success workshops will facilitate student peer learning that are designed to increase a sense of community among students. Faculty from Los Angeles Mission College and the University of California, Los Angeles, will develop the supplemental materials and refine them via feedback provided through implementation of academic success workshops at Los Angeles Mission College. This project will also hold workshops for faculty from other institutions seeking to enhance the quantitative experience of their biology majors. The project will investigate the impact of supplemental materials used in academic success workshops on student success in college algebra and trigonometry, persistence to calculus, and successful transfer to four-year universities. The project will analyze performance of students who attended the academic success workshops to students who did not. The project will develop a model that targets a diverse student population in the biological sciences that may increase success, retention, and degree completion rates via contextualized mathematics in the biological sciences.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.