Improving STEM Degree Completion with Professional Development to Support Inclusive and Equitable Classroom Practices

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With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (HSI Program), this project aims to facilitate institutional transformation by addressing environmental factors that negatively influence STEM degree completion for groups of students. The project will offer a series of workshops that promote inclusivity in STEM fields by considering research on systemic issues and barriers to academic success. The project will seek to address degree completion disparities by providing faculty and administrators with activities, exercises, and facilitated discussions of research literature to examine social and cultural factors associated with their own and their students' lived experiences at the institution. The project will also leverage existing efforts on campus that aim to create more inclusive academic spaces. By taking a collaborative research-oriented approach to working with faculty and administrators, the project will seek to provide processes that other institutions can follow.To directly address the importance of culture in the classroom, the project will employ a mixed methods research design, and a multi-session faculty professional development series integrated into the broader campus community, that provides faculty with a curriculum that will advance inclusion and equity in their learning spaces. Three overarching goals guide this project. First is to lay a solid foundation of local and national data related to disparities in persistence and retention that will be used to inform participant practices and behaviors in the classroom. Second is to increase awareness of the social and cultural locations of STEM students. Third is to modify classroom practices and policies in order to increase student engagement and success. Several research questions will be explored by the project team. According to STEM students, what social and cultural factors need to be considered to improve the classroom climate? What is the impact of participation in project activities on faculty conceptions of diversity and inclusion in the classroom? How does faculty participation in the project lead to increased implementation of evidence-based inclusive teaching? The key motivating factors for this project are to address systemic inequity that is manifested in STEM degree completion disparities and to share methods, data, and findings with HSIs across the country. Dissemination efforts will include a project website for sharing pertinent project information, multiple research publications and presentations, a research conference on creating inclusive academic spaces, and strategic connections with existing programs that are part of the NSF INCLUDES Network. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs. Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves our understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also draw from these approaches to 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.