Strengthening the STEM High School-to-Workforce Pipeline for Urban, Low-Income Students

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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 D'Youville College. Over its five-year duration, this project will fund scholarships to 13 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biology. First-year biology majors will receive four-year scholarships. The project aims to increase persistence and foster students' STEM identity through faculty mentoring, cohort-building, ePortfolios, and gamification curriculum embedded into biology courses. Internships and research experiences will benefit scholars, faculty, and local industries. This project will contribute new knowledge to the field of biology education and will help to address a pressing need in the Western New York region for highly qualified biologists. The overall goal of this project is to increase biology degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. D’Youville University, though this project, will achieve the following objectives: (1) Recruit a diverse applicant pool and provide scholarships for 13 low-income, academically talented students with unmet financial need; (2) Achieve first-year retention rates of 80% and a four-year graduation rate of 70% for the cohort; (3) Provide 100% of scholars with career-development activities to enhance their post-graduation success in obtaining STEM employment or acceptance into a graduate-degree program; and (4) Investigate how an innovative gamification approach in the biology pedagogy and the use of ePortfolios impact student engagement, success, and STEM identity for low-income biology majors in STEM. Gamification is a high-impact practice shown to increase student engagement in computer science, and ePortfolios are a demonstrated high-impact practice to build STEM identity broadly. However, there are gaps in the literature for the use of gamification and ePortfolios in biology; the data collected for this project will help to fill those gaps. In addition to educational research, the mixed-methods, culturally informed evaluation will explore potential impacts of the program on desired metrics (i.e., participant sense of belonging, self-efficacy, persistence, and retention in STEM). Dissemination activities will target the D’Youville community, the local K-12 community, and area STEM industry as well as broad national stakeholders. 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.