HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Leveraging Social Psychology Interventions to Promote First Year STEM Persistence

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With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2: IEP, from City University of New York- John Jay College aims to support the high school to college transition of underrepresented minority (URM) science students to increase their first-year retention and ultimate promote higher graduation of these students. The first year of college has been shown to be a critical time in which students struggle and desist from studying and graduating with STEM degrees. The project is designed to better prepare 1st year students for the rigorous academic demands of majoring in the sciences and address the specific underlying psychological processes that contribute to URM students' concerns and challenges in STEM. In addition, the project will work with STEM faculty in establishing a “growth mindset” classroom. The project is positioned to increase the number of URM students who graduate in STEM-related fields, improve their academic outcomes, and increase their interest in pursuing graduate school and careers in STEM. The approach will address psychological, academic, social, and educational needs of URM students simultaneously through a multi-faceted strategy, and these findings will ultimately help other educators develop strategies that better support student populations in our Hispanic-serving institutions (HSI).The goals of the project are to: (1) increase first-year college students' engagement and retention in STEM via the implementation of empirically supported social psychological interventions, (2) enhance STEM students’ cultural knowledge and academic preparation through study skills training and mentoring, and (3) expand STEM faculty’s expertise to convey a growth mindset to students. It is hypothesized that participation in a social-psychological and study skills and time management training will reduce social identity threat and increase feelings of belonging, and identification and interest in STEM. The project is guided by a multi-pronged intervention that will utilize a quasi-experimental mixed factorial research design to examine whether the program influences both objective (i.e., GPA, first-year retention) and subjective (e.g., sense of belonging, identification in STEM) outcomes. It is predicted that the end-of-year GPA and first-year retention in STEM will be significantly higher for students who received the intervention than for students who did not receive the intervention and will promote persistence in first-year STEM students, increasing their likelihood of graduating in STEM disciplines. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also 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.