Empowering Academically Talented STEM Undergraduates through Early Experiences in Teaching and Mentoring of K-8 Youth

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This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO). UNO is a metropolitan university that pursues excellence in teaching, research, and service to provide an educated workforce and citizenry to the region. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund four-year scholarships to 24 students who are pursuing a bachelor's degree in biology, chemistry, environmental studies, geology, molecular and biomedical biology, bioinformatics, neuroscience, or physics. The project will provide early and innovative professional development and leadership opportunities that prepare undergraduates for 21st century employment in science, using a locally developed mentoring and teaching model combined with carefully designed course-based undergraduate research experiences. The program will engage undergraduates in teaching and mentoring of K-8 students in an after-school program of problem-based learning STEM lessons in the highly diverse Omaha Public School District. Almost 75% of the students from the Omaha Public School District are economically disadvantaged. This project will contribute to an understanding of how to improve STEM learning, not only for undergraduate students, but for all learners. At the same time, this project will generate a STEM pipeline from K-8 through college and into the workforce.The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Specifically, this project aims to strengthen the STEM workforce by using scholarship funding coupled with a locally developed, successful mentoring and teaching model and course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs). Though both the strategies of teaching and mentoring models and the CUREs have been shown to be effective in increasing student retention and success in the STEM disciplines, the impact on low- income, academically talented students has not been specifically investigated. This project aims to determine the combined effect. Furthermore, the project has the potential to generate a robust STEM pipeline by encouraging K-8 youth to consider science as a field via their mentorship by undergraduates of similar backgrounds. If such interventions can help address local STEM learning challenges and enhance the STEM pipeline, it will represent a vertically integrated project to be embraced as a national model worthy of replication. The effectiveness of the project will be evaluated using a convergent typological model inclusive of mixed methods allowing quantitative and qualitative analyses. Results of this project will be made available at local, regional, and national meetings as well as by publication in education and discipline-specific journals. 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. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students.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.