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

S-STEM研究中心将通过支持有经济需求的高成就、低收入学生的留学和毕业，为国家对受过良好教育的工程师的需求做出贡献。该研究中心是由弗吉尼亚理工大学、北弗吉尼亚社区学院、韦伯州立大学和辛辛那提大学合作建立的。该项目将把与这些学生相关的许多挑战重新定义为“组织”挑战，而不是“与学生有关”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第一次上大学的学生和转校生，确保这项研究将支持扩大STEM参与度的持续努力，并为学生获得学士学位找到更具成本效益的方法。该中心将支持一系列综合活动，每一项活动都旨在吸引一系列以低收入工科学生为核心的项目。该中心将支持来自STEM(S-STEM)项目社区(共40个)奖学金的加速器资助，重点是了解他们的合作伙伴关系设计、流程和结构的有效性；四个资助团队将接受中心领导层的结构化指导。与加速器赠款相关的组织合作伙伴将被邀请到暑期学院，分享项目中的想法和数据，并制定针对校园的行动计划。阐明复杂的学生支持网络如何更好地发挥作用，将确定STEM教育系统中的新效率，以便更明智地利用有限的资源，并扩大收益。该研究中心的总体目标是增加低收入、高成就、有经济需求的本科生完成STEM学位。尽管不断有人呼吁在STEM教育系统内进行有利于伙伴关系的系统性、结构性和可持续的变革，但理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业道路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让S-STEM项目参与，重点是不同院校背景下的低收入工科学生，这将确保拟议的数据收集和整合将取得成功，包括研究加速器资助和暑期研究所。由于加速器赠款项目将在各机构内具体情况，再加上夏季首脑会议期间行动计划的制定，中心的研究活动将导致各机构的实际程序改进。根据有关合作、制度逻辑和联合课程支持模式的文献，该中心还将对S-STEM项目负责人及其组织合作伙伴进行多个案例研究。这项活动将把S-STEM项目和其他档案数据集的现有学生成功数据流与新生成的伙伴关系数据流整合在一起。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科学生的伙伴关系流程和合作类型的新知识。该中心将为S-STEM社区提供可访问和有用的产品(例如，从研究到实践的简报)，并从各种机构发展一个充满活力的实践社区，这些机构专注于建立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、工程和数学奖学金项目资助，该项目旨在增加在STEM领域获得学位的低收入学术天才学生的数量。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业成功、留住、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优势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.