Project Kaihuwaa: Advancing Low-Income Students in STEM through a Culturally-Appropriate Academic Journey

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This five-year project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the success of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of Hawaii Maui College (UHMC), a two-year, commuter institution. This project will fund 75 annual scholarships to four cohorts of six students (24 total students) who are pursuing associate's degrees and plan to complete bachelor's degrees in Engineering Technology, Electronic & Computer Engineering Technology, and Natural Science. Scholars will receive a series of evidence-based interventions, including STEM faculty mentoring, advising using a guided pathway tool to align two- and four-year degrees, semester cohort activities as well as opportunities to participate in leadership development activities, research, or internships. The project will also work to increase the UHMC STEM department's capacity to retain, transfer, and graduate low-income and talented STEM students. This will be accomplished through faculty professional development and enhancing existing evidence-based student success initiatives with a culturally-competent framework, the Ka'ao Framework, across STEM courses. Because UHMC has a high population of Native Hawaiian students, this project has the potential to broaden participation in STEM fields. The goals of the project are to build institutional capacity to better serve low-income (including Native Hawaiian) students by increasing 1) STEM faculty capacity to serve low-income students, and 2) academic success, retention, graduation and transfer rates of low-income scholars. The project seeks to design and implement an innovative, culturally-appropriate academic program for UHMC low-income students to improve overall graduation and transfer rates to four-year institutions. In addition, the project seeks to understand how the integration of the indigenous Ka'ao Framework, based on Tinto's model of institutional departure, impacts scholar success indicators, especially for low-income and Native Hawaiian STEM students. Results will be used to advance knowledge of the impact of integrating culturally-appropriate models on the success of STEM students in places with distinctive cultural traits, such as Hawaii. The knowledge generation component will test the hypothesis that the Ka'ao Framework's preventative classroom intervention will be a protective factor for fall-to-fall retention for low-income UHMC students. Comparisons will be made to evaluate the effect the Ka'ao Framework has on student outcomes. This will include a comparison of participating students to like-students that do not receive the intervention. Using data analytics to build a predictive statistical model of significant factors in retention, graduation, and transfer, the project will explore what works for whom among STEM majors, low-income STEM majors, and Native Hawaiian STEM majors at a two-year institution. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of low-income, academically talented students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. This timely research extends emerging evidence-based practices when the nation is critically examining ways to improve low national graduation and retention rates to meet future STEM workforce demands.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.