Capacity Building for Students and Faculty Through Partnerships, Research, Innovation, Mentoring, and Engagement

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With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 1: Building Capacity project aims to improve retention and graduation rates for undergraduate STEM students at Texas Woman’s University (TWU). TWU, the largest public university primarily for women in the United States, is a Hispanic-serving Institution with an enrollment of approximately 10,300 undergraduate students, 88% of whom are female. This project intends to establish the TWU-Partnerships, Research, Innovation, Mentoring, and Engagement (TWU-PRIME) Program to improve faculty engagement and student learning and retention in STEM. This project includes three key elements: 1) redesigning introductory courses in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, 2) supporting faculty to include innovative, evidence-based, and culturally relevant approaches in their teaching, and 3) providing opportunities for students to engage in mentored research internships with local STEM industries. These elements together are intended to improve STEM teaching and learning to foster increased retention and graduation rates for STEM students at TWU.TWU-PRIME seeks to build capacity by increasing STEM engagement, retention, and graduation through three strategies: 1) improving performance in STEM foundation courses through course redesign, 2) developing a Faculty Community of Practice, and 3) launching meaningful STEM learning experiences through mentored research and internships for students and the development of collaborations between faculty and external partners. Course redesign efforts will include personalized learning approaches, flipped or inverted classrooms, cooperative learning, and/or case study teaching. Faculty instructors in foundational courses in biology, chemistry, and mathematics will be integrated into a community of practice, which will support both course redesign efforts and integration of diversity competency development to recognize students’ social identities and lived experiences. Research internships with local community partners such as HealthTrakRx, Mentor LLC, and the Noble Research Institute will be established to provide meaningful research experiences for students and to facilitate the development of faculty relationships with industry and research partners. These external partnerships are anticipated to have long-term benefits for the workforce relying on STEM graduates and to create new and meaningful knowledge about how cross-sector partnerships contribute to STEM teaching and learning and to workforce development. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.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.