Leveraging Familial Support Systems to Increase Retention of Low Income, Academically Talented Undergraduate STEM Students

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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. The project will support students at Juniata College, which serves a high proportion of first generation and low-income students. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund four-year scholarships to 18 students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in Biology, Environmental Science, Chemistry, Physics, Geology, and/or Computer Science. Specifically, the project aims to increase student persistence in STEM fields through establishing a system of supports and activities that emphasize undergraduate research and STEM careers. The project will reach out to prospective students and families to inform them of the wide range of STEM careers. The project will support a group of 18 low-income, academically talented students with scholarships and major-specific faculty mentoring. It will also provide focused programming to all enrolled STEM students, thus broadening the impact of the project. This project will investigate how proactive family engagement can help low-income students best use their family support systems to attain positive academic outcomes. This work will contribute to increased understanding of the role of families in support of undergraduate student academic success. Because Juniata College has a high population of low-income STEM students from rural areas, this project has the potential to increase participation of these students in STEM fields. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. It will do so by focusing on the role of familial support systems in recruiting, enrolling, and retaining low-income STEM students, particularly those from rural areas. There are five project objectives: 1. Develop an enrollment program to inform perspective students' families about STEM careers; 2. Provide four-year scholarships to 18 low-income, academically talented first-year STEM students; 3. Support persistence of Scholars to graduation; 4. Increase the percentage of Juniata STEM students who continue in a STEM field post-graduation; and 5. Assess the impact of student communication with familial support systems on retention in STEM. This project aims to answer the research question: Can institutional practices that facilitate the development of familial support systems for low-income students help to recruit and retain low-income students in STEM? The project will coordinate student recruitment, course development, family outreach and engagement, and community building to support scholarship students. The project aims to help students maintain strong family ties and draw on that resource to support completion of their academic goals. The project will be evaluated by comparing the experiences of scholarship students, non-scholarship students, and a randomly selected group of low-income non-STEM students. Measures of academic need, social and academic support, as well as access to, and satisfaction with, institutional support will be compared between study groups. Project results will be disseminated through presentations at teaching conferences, publication in relevant journals, and communication with the S-STEM community via the project website and professional listservs. 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.