Engaging, Mentoring, Retaining, and Graduating STEM Scholars

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With funding from the National Science Foundation's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, this project will support the success of 32 high-achieving students with demonstrated financial need at Colby-Sawyer College. Throughout its five years, this project will fund scholarships to two groups of seven students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in biology. The State of New Hampshire is experiencing rapid growth in STEM jobs. Therefore, growth in the number of students who complete STEM degrees is critical. This project will provide financial, academic, and social support to help Scholars complete STEM degrees so that they can take advantage of these job opportunities. Faculty from different STEM disciplines will mentor the Scholars throughout the program, from students' acceptance into the program through graduation. The faculty mentors will coordinate summer quantitative skill building and orientation activities for the Scholars, to reinforce the expectations and value of college education. Then, faculty will conduct weekly study seminars and provide regular advising throughout the students' college career. At early stages, the support activities will introduce the Scholars to a wide range of career and post-graduate opportunities in STEM. As the students advance, the support activities will shift to internships, research, resume writing, and interview strategies, to support career preparation and graduate school acceptance or job placement. The expected outcomes of the project include an assessment of the utility of specific study strategies and learning interventions for STEM students and placement of students into the STEM workforce or graduate school upon completion of their college degree. The project will support 14 academically high-achieving, lower-income students as they pursue B.S. degrees in Biology at Colby-Sawyer College. By 2020, it is expected that 14% of employment in New Hampshire will be in STEM-related occupations. Yet, New Hampshire ranks last among states in the number of bachelor's degrees awarded in the STEM disciplines. Additionally, students from lower-income areas are known to be more challenging to retain, particularly during the first year of college. This project will recruit academically high-achieving students within that population and help students persist through graduation and on to careers or graduate school in STEM. The project will provide Scholars with scholarships, orientation and community-building activities, quantitative skill building, and study skills training. Faculty mentors will lead the study skills training, instructing students in Successive Relearning, a strategy that combines Distributed Practice and Practice Testing. Successive relearning has been shown to be an effective study strategy, showing larger learning gains than traditional study strategies. The project will measure its efficacy for improving success and retention of academically-talented students from lower-income areas in a Biology major, thus contributing to knowledge about supporting STEM student success.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.