UWM STEM CELL: An integrated approach to improve early college STEM education outcomes

UWM STEM CELL是一个试点项目，旨在解决教学和社会文化问题，这些问题导致在本科阶段缺乏毅力，有才华和感兴趣的学生离开科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）专业。许多有抱负的STEM学生缺乏关于如何在大学环境中成功运作的文化知识，对STEM职业需要什么知之甚少，并且学术背景不足。STEM CELL将从根本上重新调整机构文化，从一种自然流失模式转向一种注重学生成果的模式，强调STEM的坚持、学习、热情和明智的决策。该项目将为需要学术支持的学生提供支持，为STEM专业和职业选择提供个性化指导，并让学生沉浸在实用的、综合的、早期的学术职业经历中，以帮助他们选择学习领域和职业道路。该项目将通过综合应用一套低成本、高影响力的干预措施来实现其目标，包括有意地在数学、化学和生物课程之间跨学科边界进行课程调整，实施主动学习的教学法模式，发展一个具有综合学术和社会支持的学习社区，并明确关注相关问题，包括构建动态的个人发展计划。该综合干预措施将通过随机试验进行严格评估和测试，干预措施将与评估设计明确地共同规划。这项评估将为这种可扩展的、可持续的综合干预措施的有效性提供明确的信息，因此将与全国的高等教育机构相关。

UWM STEM CELL is a pilot project to address pedagogical and sociocultural issues that contribute to the lack of persistence and the flow of talented and interested students away from science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) majors at the early-career undergraduate level. Many aspirational STEM students lack the cultural knowledge about how to operate successfully in a university setting, have little idea what a STEM career entails, and have academic backgrounds that are deficient. STEM CELL will fundamentally reorient the institutional culture from an attrition model to one that is focused on student outcomes emphasizing STEM persistence, learning, enthusiasm and informed decision making. The project will sustain students in need of academic support, provide individualized guidance regarding STEM major and career choices, and immerse students in practical, integrative, early academic career experiences to help inform their chosen fields of study and career paths. The project will accomplish its goals through the comprehensive application of a suite of low-cost, high-impact interventions, including intentional course alignment across disciplinary boundaries among courses in mathematics, chemistry, and biology, implementation of active learning modes of pedagogy, development of a learning community with integrated academic and social supports, and explicit attention to issues of relevance including the construction of a dynamic individual development plan. This comprehensive intervention will be rigorously evaluated and tested by a randomized trial, with the intervention explicitly co-planned alongside the evaluation design. This evaluation will provide unambiguous information regarding the effectiveness of this scalable, sustainable comprehensive intervention and thus will be relevant to institutions of higher education nationwide.