Educating Undergraduate Students for STEM Career Opportunities in Nebraska: Networks, Experiential-learning, & Computational Thinking

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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. Over five years, this project will fund two- and four-year scholarships to 124 STEM students who are pursuing associate degrees at Southeast Community College or Western Nebraska Community College and bachelor degrees at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The project will recruit, educate, and mentor cohorts of academically talented, low-income students, with the goal of supporting the graduation of Scholars who have expertise in mathematics and computer science and who are prepared to enter the STEM workforce or pursue graduate education in a STEM field. The project will emphasize recruiting women, underrepresented minorities, first-generation students, and rural students, thus contributing to the diversity of the STEM workforce. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. At all three campuses, Scholars will take special sections of computer science and mathematics courses during their first two years. Faculty from the three partner institutions will collaborate to implement active learning approaches and to use open education resources that are currently being developed at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Scholars will take a one-credit seminar designed to help students develop leadership potential, gain valuable academic skills, become informed about available support services, and build a supportive peer community. In addition to staff advisers who will support all students, each S-STEM Scholar will have faculty and peer mentors, who will contribute to building a supportive network that can attend to S-STEM Scholars' academic and non-academic needs. The project's mixed methods efficacy research study aims to answer the research question: To what extent are project activities and structures helping the scholars persist in their selected STEM majors and STEM career pathways? Findings from this research will advance understanding of factors that affect the retention, academic success, and graduation of academically talented, low-income STEM students, with a special emphasis on factors that affect students who transfer from a community college to a four-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. 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.