Building Capacity: Polytechnic for All: STEM Undergraduate Success via an Inclusive Institution

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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 about how to achieve these aims. This project at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, will advance the aims of the HSI Program by developing and implementing a multi-faceted approach to enhance student learning and success in STEM. First, the project will compare the impact of two different motivational interventions on student learning. One intervention targets students' sense of how the course material is personally relevant or useful in their lives; the other intervention helps students realize that worries about belonging in college are normal, transient, and improve over time. Second, the project will create opportunities for faculty to study, design, and use inclusive practices, including active learning. Third, the project will study the impact of a peer-led supplemental instruction program focused on second-year engineering courses. The project activities and outcomes can advance our understanding of how faculty learn to create an inclusive classroom. Moreover, the project can illuminate the impact that different approaches to inclusiveness have on students' academic success, motivation, and well-being. This project aims to promote creation of inclusive classroom environments. The project will employ two motivational interventions that seek to promote student STEM success in critical transition courses. One intervention focuses on increasing students' understanding of how the content is relevant; the other targets students' sense of social belonging in college-level STEM courses. To assess the efficacy of the motivation interventions, the project will use randomized, controlled trials to determine how the two psychosocial treatments affect the academic success and well-being of students enrolled in first year physics and calculus courses. The impact of faculty professional development efforts will be examined with mixed methods approaches, including pre-post surveys, teaching strategies inventories, and interviews. The impact of the peer-led supplemental instruction program will be determined by comparing outcomes for a matched set of students who do and do not participate in the program. Measures for this facet of the project include course grades, sense of self-efficacy, motivation, and content knowledge. This project will generate new knowledge about how to implement inclusive STEM teaching reforms anchored in an understanding of motivation and social-psychological factors that lead to increased student success in STEM.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.