Collaborative Research: A Research Hub for Understanding Inter- and intra-institutional partnerships that systematically support low-income engineering students

这个S-STEM研究中心将通过支持具有经济需求的高成就，低收入学生的保留和毕业，为国家对受过良好教育的工程师的需求做出贡献。 该研究中心是弗吉尼亚理工大学、北方弗吉尼亚社区学院、韦伯州立大学和辛辛那提大学之间的合作。 该项目将重新定义与这些学生相关的许多挑战，使其成为“组织”挑战，而不是“与学生相关”的挑战，致力于使复杂的学生支持网络更好地为学生服务。该研究中心明确关注首次进入大学和转学学生，确保这项研究将支持正在进行的努力，以扩大STEM的参与，并为学生获得学士学位确定更具成本效益的方法。该中心将支持一系列综合活动，每一项活动都旨在参与一系列以低收入工程专业学生为核心的多元化项目。该中心将支持STEM奖学金（S-STEM）计划社区（共40个）的加速器赠款，重点是了解其合作伙伴关系设计，流程和结构的有效性;四个赠款团队将接受来自中心领导的结构化指导。与加速器赠款相关的组织合作伙伴将被邀请到暑期学院，分享项目的想法和数据，并制定校园特定的行动计划。阐明学生支持的复杂网络如何更好地工作将确定STEM教育系统的新效率，以便更明智地使用有限的资源，并扩大收益。这个研究中心的总体目标是提高低收入，高成就的本科生的STEM学位完成率，并证明经济需要。尽管人们不断呼吁在STEM教育系统内实现系统性、结构性和可持续的伙伴关系变革，但了解这种伙伴关系是如何建立、设计和维持的仍然是一个难以实现的目标。该项目将促进对支持国内低收入工科学生学术途径的组织伙伴关系的理解，解决首要问题：如何设计，建立和维持机构内和机构间的伙伴关系，以系统地支持低收入工科学生的成功？该中心有具体的机制，以参与S-STEM计划，重点是不同机构背景下的低收入工程专业学生，这将确保拟议的数据收集和整合将取得成功，包括研究加速器赠款和暑期学院。由于加速器赠款项目将在机构内根据具体情况进行，并在夏季峰会期间制定行动计划，该中心的研究活动将导致各机构的实际流程改进。通过对合作，机构逻辑和课外支持模式的文献了解，该中心还将对S-STEM项目领导人及其组织合作伙伴进行多个案例研究。这项活动将整合现有的学生成功数据流跨S-STEM程序和其他档案数据集与新生成的合作伙伴关系数据流。通过将不同的组织伙伴关系模式和方法与现有的学生成功数据流联系起来，该中心将产生关于学院和大学可能希望制度化以最好地支持低收入工程专业学生的伙伴关系流程和合作的新知识。该中心将为S-STEM社区生产可访问和有用的产品（例如，研究实践简报），并从各种机构发展一个充满活力的实践社区，重点是支持低收入工程专业学生的研究知情的组织伙伴关系。该项目由NSF的科学，技术，工程和数学奖学金计划资助，该计划旨在增加低收入学术人才的数量，这些学生表现出经济需求，并获得STEM领域的学位。它还旨在改善未来STEM工作者的教育，并产生关于低收入学生的学术成功，保留，转移，毕业和学术/职业道路的知识。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This S-STEM Research Hub will contribute to the national need for well-educated engineers by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need. The research hub is a collaboration between Virginia Tech, Northern Virginia Community College, Weber State University, and the University of Cincinnati. This project will reframe the many challenges associated with these students to be “organizational” challenges as opposed to “student-related” challenges, working on making the complex web of student supports work better for students. This research hub’s explicit focus on both first-time-in-college and transfer students ensures that this research will support ongoing efforts to broaden participation in STEM and identify more cost-effective ways for students to earn a bachelor’s degree. The hub will support a series of integrated activities, each designed to engage a diverse set of programs with a core focus on low-income engineering students. This hub will support accelerator grants from the Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) program community (40 total) focused on understanding the efficacy of their partnership designs, processes, and structures; four cohorts of grant teams will receive structured mentoring from hub leadership. Organizational partners associated with the accelerator grants will be invited to summer institutes to share ideas and data across projects and build campus-specific action plans. Illuminating how the complex web of student support can work better will identify new efficiencies in the STEM education system so that limited resources can be more wisely spent, and benefits can be extended.The overall goal of this Research Hub is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. Although there are continual calls for partnership-enabled systemic, structural, and sustainable change within STEM education systems, understanding how such partnerships are built, designed, and sustained remains an elusive goal. This project will advance understanding of organizational partnerships that support academic pathways for domestic low-income engineering students, addressing the overarching question: How can intra- and inter-institutional partnerships be designed, built, and sustained to systematically support low-income engineering student success? The hub has specific mechanisms to engage S-STEM programs focused on low-income engineering students across diverse institutional contexts which will ensure that proposed data collection and integration will be successful, including research accelerator grants and summer institutes. Because accelerator grant projects will be contextually specific within institutions and coupled with the development of action plans during summer summits, the hub’s research activities will result in actual process improvements across institutions. Informed by literature on collaboration, institutional logics, and the model of co-curricular supports, the hub will also conduct a multiple case study of S-STEM program leaders and their organizational partners. This activity will integrate existing student success data streams across S-STEM programs and other archival data sets with the newly generated partnerships data stream. By linking the different organizational partnership models and approaches to existing student success data streams, the hub will generate new knowledge regarding the kinds of partnership processes and collaborations that colleges and universities may want to institutionalize to best support low-income engineering students. The hub will produce accessible and useful products for the S-STEM community (e.g., research-to-practice briefs) and develop a vibrant community of practice from a diverse range of institutions focused on research-informed organizational partnerships that support low-income engineering students. 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.