Building Capacity: STEM Student Success from Two-year to Four-year Institutions through Classroom-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences

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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 will advance the aims of the HSI Program by adding course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) to introductory algebra, biology, and chemistry courses, which serve as gateways into STEM majors. This project is a collaboration between Miami Dade College, the largest two-year HSI in the nation, the University of Florida, and the University of Miami. The project predicts that the addition of CURES will enhance the undergraduate learning experience, thus supporting increases in the number of students obtaining associate degrees in STEM disciplines and in the success of students in transferring to four-year institutions. The project will identify factors for increasing retention and completion rates in STEM degree programs for undergraduates, including Hispanic and underserved students. The project seeks to enrich the STEM workforce by increasing the number of trained STEM professionals.The goal of the project is to increase undergraduate persistence and completion in the STEM degrees through the adoption of CURE-infused STEM gateway activities. This project aims to improve understanding of how integration of CUREs and other educational supports in gateway courses will affect retention and completion rates of undergraduate students. Faculty will participate in professional development activities to incorporate CUREs into STEM gateway courses in mathematics, biology, and chemistry. The CUREs in gateway courses will be designed to enhance the student experience by engaging students in contextualized learning with real world experiences. The students in the CURE-infused STEM courses will devise their own investigations, write a scientific research paper, and present their findings at a public poster session. The senior undergraduate students and graduate students from the University of Florida and the University of Miami, along with the faculty from Miami Dade College teaching the gateway courses, will lead authentic research laboratories at Miami Dade College. Through curricular enhancement, together with faculty professional development, this project seeks to 1) increase the percentage of STEM students enrolled in CURE-infused STEM gateway courses in the disciplines of mathematics, biology, and chemistry; 2) increase the number of undergraduates continuing from a first to a second sequential STEM course; 3) increase the number of undergraduates completing a STEM associate degree in three years; 4) increase the percentage of students successfully transferring into STEM baccalaureate programs; 5) increase the number of STEM faculty teaching CURE-infused STEM courses; and 6) increase the number of students participating in CURE-infused STEM courses. By collecting and analyzing quantitative and qualitative data, the project can generate new knowledge about the factors that stimulate student persistence and completion in STEM at the Community College level. The project seeks to develop a model for integrating CUREs into the STEM curriculum that could be useful to other institutions, especially Hispanic-Serving Community Colleges.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.