Building Capacity: Building Bridges into Engineering and Computer Science

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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 Wilbur Wright College will advance the aims of the HSI Program by enabling talented, underprepared, low-income students to pursue and complete a bachelor's degree in engineering or computer science. Public schools in urban areas struggle to prepare their large populations of low-income students in math and science. Thus, many high school graduates are not well prepared to pursue further education requiring quantitative or analytical thinking, or to join the US workforce in jobs demanding these skills. This project aims to develop and implement pathways, practices, and interventions to support student success in engineering or computer science at two critical transitions: from high school to community college, and from community college to four-year universities. The project plans to achieve this goal partly through streamlined connections between Wilbur Wright College, the Chicago Public schools, and public four-year colleges and universities in Illinois. The strategies developed and the knowledge produced in this project are expected to be significant to a broad segment of public education.The project will be centered at Wilbur Wright College, an urban community college in the City Colleges of Chicago system. Wilbur Wright College is the largest federally recognized Hispanic-serving community college in Illinois. The project aims to build bridges across critical transitions by creating a Summer Bridge Camp to improve math skills and prepare incoming students for an engineering or computer science curriculum. It will also create a one-year engineering Gateway course to further strengthen students' math skills and self-efficacy. The project also aims to enhance practices that support the development of students' professional identity (i.e. the ability to see themselves as engineers or computer scientists), through faculty and near-peer mentoring, tutoring, intentional advising, engineering and computer science social events, and participation in professional meetings. The project will track students' semester-to-semester GPA, retention, transfer, graduation rates, and length of time to complete the associate's and bachelor's degrees. Self-efficacy and identity will be measured by an educational research professional. This project is expected to contribute to the national need for a diverse engineering and computer science workforce.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.