Building Capacity: Guiding Critical Transitions to the Baccalaureate

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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 Riverside City College will advance the aims of the HSI Program by developing and analyzing the impact of six interventions for Riverside College Promise Program students who have declared STEM majors. The interventions include a summer bridge program from high school to college, home courses, college and career workshops, research experiences, near-peer mentoring, and cross-enrollment courses. The project seeks to increase retention within STEM programs at Riverside City College as well as increase the transfer rates to baccalaureate STEM degrees at four-year institutions such as California State University, San Bernardino and the University of California, Riverside. Project collaborators from these institutions will lead summer research for Riverside City College students; faculty from the University of California, Irvine will conduct educational research related to the project. Through interventions and partnerships, this project seeks to increase undergraduate retention, enrollment, and graduation and transfer rates in STEM degree programs. This project will investigate the impact of a program and its sub-components on student academic performance and STEM degree attainment. The project seeks to determine the most critical components in improving student academic outcomes and persistence, particularly for low-income and traditionally underrepresented minorities. The project will also investigate factors essential to student success in navigating the critical transitions from high school to two-year college and from two-year college to four-year university. The project study will include a quantitative research component that employs a rigorous quasi-experimental design to understand the impact of the project on student academic outcomes. The project will gather data on the impact of the interventions on the rates of students earning a STEM baccalaureate degree. A qualitative research component will produce an understanding about how each sub-component contributes to an objective outcome measure and will ascertain perceptions about the sub-component, student involvement levels, and potential implementation barriers. Results of this research will be shared with other institutions seeking to build STEM degree programs via interventions.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.