Walking Together to Increase Participation of Students from Underrepresented Groups in Engineering

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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 the University of Arizona (UA), a Hispanic Serving Institution, and two regional Tribal Colleges - Tohono O’odham Community College (TOCC) and San Carlos Apache College (SCAC). During the project, faculty from the three institutions will spend time on the three campuses to gain insight into the day-to-day student life at TOCC and SCAC as well as the College of Engineering at UA. TOCC and SCAC faculty will learn about the 15 undergraduate engineering degree programs. Everyone will participate in workshops to design collaborative student programs in which UA, TOCC and SCAC student communities are formed prior to transfer to the UA. By providing need-based scholarships and structuring a community through which students will advance through challenging curriculum and develop a sense of belonging in their career pathway, this program aims to benefit society by increasing students from underrepresented minority (URM) groups and low-income students’ access to the engineering profession. Through increased persistence of low-income students and students from URM groups in engineering, subsequent incoming students will see themselves better represented and continue to pursue a career in engineering. More diverse engineering graduates will shift and widen the lens through which technical problems are solved in society and employers realize that this encourages innovation.The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The team will begin with a Collaborative Planning project to better understand the barriers to success for Indigenous students as they enter STEM programs and transfer to large institutions of higher learning. The team will strive to incorporate culturally relevant concepts such as Himdag (the O’odham way of life that includes respect for oneself, for others, for elders, and for the land), and the heritage of the San Carlos Apache (deeply tied to Mother Earth) into UA engineering courses. The team will study how programs that employ mentorship from peers, professionals, and faculty, impact students’ sense of belonging. Sense of belonging has been studied in terms of students’ affiliation with a campus, but this project extends previous research to evaluate students’ sense of belonging in the engineering profession, and how academic support and co-curricular programming impacts that sense of belonging, persistence, and retention. The educational researcher in collaboration with the program evaluator will organize focus groups and surveys to uncover student needs. The ultimate goal is to submit a S-STEM Track 3 proposal in March 2023. The planning grant provides time to gather institutional data from the 3 institutions to develop appropriate interventions, define scholarship eligibility requirements, establish scholarship amounts, and establish advisory boards. The institutions will establish memorandums of understanding and transfer articulation agreements. 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.