Life STEM EAGER: Exploring the efficacy of an undergraduate voluntary intervention using near-peer mentoring to transfer positive behaviors through extracurricular team competition

ECR项目强调基础STEM教育研究，这将产生该领域的基础知识。该项目将探索一种早期的、未经测试的干预措施，旨在促进帮助代表性不足的少数民族学生在生物学入门课程中取得成功并坚持STEM职业的方法。该项目将研究将基于团队的地理教学玩法与近同伴指导相结合是否能帮助学生掌握生物学的内容和技能。它还将检查干预是否会改变学生在参与基于问题的学习活动和内容驱动的社会互动时对科学的信念和行为。干预将在课外环境中进行，以帮助学生发展自我价值和自我导向，作为建立更广泛的STEM学习者社区的一部分。与学生有着相似背景的导师将在学术和社会领域接受培训，以确保学生对生物学有更深入的了解，并看到该领域与他们的生活和其他STEM学科的相关性。这项研究将采用一种完全不同的研究方法，通过结合理论来检验多种因素，这些因素显示出协同影响动机，并改善代表性不足的学生的学习。通过混合方法的方法，将收集和分析学术和个人因素的数据。尽管该项目有这些值得注意的方面，但这种干预将存在风险。具体来说，这是一个新颖的研究课题，活动不包括直接的日常教师监督或定期评分的课堂作业。此外，该项目将要求学生自我激励和自我指导来完成任务，并不能保证学生自愿参与，也不能抵制可能阻止他们参与研究的社会压力。因此，这项研究是否能够完成，是否会改变学生的学术知识和技能，是否会改变学生的信仰和行为，目前还不清楚。然而，干预措施在塑造有效干预模式的发展方面具有潜在的变革性，并减少了转向不同专业或退出STEM领域的代表性不足的学生人数。这些潜在的成果使该项目成为资助的优先事项，并将有助于在ECR项目组合中提供有关STEM教育的基础知识。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The ECR program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. This project will explore an early-stage, untested intervention aimed at promoting ways to help underrepresented minority students succeed in introductory biology courses and persist in STEM careers. The project will study whether combining team-based geocaching gameplay with near-peer mentoring will help students master content and skills in biology. It will also examine whether or not the intervention will transform students' beliefs and behaviors about science as they take part in problem-based learning activities and content-driven social interactions. The intervention will take place in an out-of-class context to help students develop self-worth and self-direction as part of building a broader STEM community of learners. Near-peer mentors of similar backgrounds as the students will be trained in both academic and social areas to ensure that students gain a deeper understanding of biology and see the relevance of this field to their lives and other STEM disciplines. The study will take a radically different approach to research by combining theories to examine multiple factors shown to synergistically influence motivation and improve learning for underrepresented students. Through a mixed methods approach, data will be collected and analyzed on both academic and personal factors. Despite these notable aspects of the project, this intervention will have risks. Specifically, it is a novel research topic, and the activities do not include direct day-to-day faculty supervision or regular graded classwork. Additionally, the project will require students to be self-motivated and self-directed to complete the tasks, and will neither guarantee that students will volunteer to participate nor resist social pressures that may prevent them from engaging in the study. Therefore, it is not clear if this study can be done or if it will alter students' academic knowledge and skills or beliefs and behaviors. However, the intervention is potentially transformative in shaping the development of effective models of intervention and reducing the number of underrepresented students who switch to different majors or drop out of STEM fields. These potential outcomes make this project a priority for funding and will contribute to foundational knowledge about STEM education in the ECR program portfolio.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.