GP-EXTRA: Personal Relevance, Global Significance - Building Education and Career Pathways in Geosciences

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The Southern Illinois University Edwardsville GEOPATHS program is a collaboration between the Geography and Environmental Sciences departments, STEM Center, student co-curricular organizations, and academic advisors focusing on integrating underrepresented racial and ethnic minorities, women, veterans, students with disabilities, and other groups into the geoscience professional community, which has traditionally lacked diversity. The program is designed to highlight the importance of geoscience careers, open pathways and reduce barriers to obtaining degrees for groups underrepresented in geosciences, and ultimately to broaden participation in the regional geoscience workforce. The program will consist of two cohorts of 10 students that will 1) conduct geoscience research that contributes to solving the region's environmental problems, 2) complete a geoscience community internship, 3) take two summer field excursions, 4) receive training in geoscience technical skills, and 5) participate in local field trips and seminars that highlight the diversity of geoscience careers. The program will lower barriers to geoscience student success, including financial limitations that can hinder underrepresented students' opportunities to participate in extra- and co-curricular activities, and thereby gain additional professional skills that employers value. The project is theoretically grounded in research on social influence and its role in student integration into the scientific community, with program elements intentionally designed to strengthen scholars' self-efficacy, science identity, and values orientation as they progress through the university, and ultimately to graduate school and/or the workforce. A key innovation is the use of the tripartite integration model of social influence (Estrada et al., 2011), a theoretical framework that has not been closely examined by geoscience education researchers. We hypothesize that by emphasizing how geoscience research and careers contribute to society, the program will help students see both the personal relevance and global significance of the geosciences. The project assessment team will conduct rigorous research exploring development of scholars? self-efficacy, identity, and values, as well as track course grades, retention in the majors, graduation rates, and post-graduation activities.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.