Building a Chemistry and Biochemistry Targeted Learning Community: The Impact of Vertical Mentoring on STEM Student Outcomes

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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 California State University San Marcos. This university is a Hispanic-serving Institution that serves a primarily commuter student population. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund scholarships of up to four years to 20 unique full-time students, in three cohorts. Scholarship recipients will be embedded in a 30-student Chemistry and Biochemistry Targeted Learning Community. The project aims to increase student persistence in STEM fields by linking scholarships with effective support activities that include a cohort model for coursework; peer, graduate student, faculty, and professional mentoring; and academic and professional workshops. Some learning community participants will become peer mentors in subsequent learning community cohorts to support the creation of a sustainable mentoring community. Given the university’s Hispanic-serving status, this project has the potential to broaden participation in STEM fields. It can also contribute new understanding about the impacts of a discipline-specific learning community with a multi-level vertical mentoring experience and co-curricular support on students’ advancement to STEM-related careers and/or graduate programs.The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. A robust project evaluation will use a comparison group approach to probe the relative importance of the scholarship relative to other aspects of the model. Non-cognitive factors, such as sense of community, have also been demonstrated to affect STEM student persistence. However, little is known about how these factors affect chemistry and biochemistry students at a Hispanic-serving Institution with a commuter population. A mixed-methods study will investigate the sense of student community and the effect of project activities on departmental and institutional change. The project has the potential to advance understanding about how student community develops and how it relates to retention rates and post-graduate competitiveness in STEM careers. Formative and summative evaluation data will be collected through surveys, focus groups, and institutional records. Results of this project will be made available through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and outreach to other four-year campuses. 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.