MCC STEM Scholarship Program

在国家科学基金会科学、技术、工程和数学奖学金(S-STEM)项目的资助下，麦克亨利县学院(MCC)将为攻读和完成STEM学位的有学业天赋的低收入学生提供奖学金和循证支持服务。三个目标活跃了这个项目的设计。首先是增加学习STEM学科的学生的多样性。第二是增加MCC STEM学者的保留率和完成率。第三是产生关于奖学金获得者的教育经历和成功的具体方式、项目活动和其他相关因素的知识。为实现这些目标，该项目的首席调查员将开展一系列全面和系统的活动。这类活动将包括在少数民族和低收入人口较多的地区高中进行现场外联和招聘工作，为促进留住学生和学生成功而持续进行的个人和队列经验，以及由管理合作委员会和大学研究人员之间的伙伴关系指导的创造知识的努力。尽管社区大学拥有大量潜在的STEM人才，但需要更多的支持，以确保它们能够让学生走上一条有希望的成功之路，特别是低收入学生。最近的证据表明，整体的学生支持方法，而不是单一的方法，对社区大学学生的保留和完成提供了更大的好处。与此同时，尽管研究已经证明了多种服务和支持对社区大学生成功的积极影响，但关于这些方法到底是如何以及为什么起作用的证据仍然有限。探索这些努力可以帮助确定提高学生在STEM中的坚持性和完成性的最有效策略。该项目不仅整合了各种支持，以帮助社区大学生在STEM取得成功，特别是那些低收入和有学术天赋的学生，而且还研究了这些努力是如何发挥作用的以及为什么。来自嵌入式研究、评估和评估的经验性知识将为小型(通常资源不足)社区大学提供有关如何协调和协调各种机构支持的信息，以及如何制度化和保持具有成本效益的合作努力，以帮助有学术天赋的低收入STEM学生。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。

With funding from the National Science Foundation's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program, McHenry County College (MCC) will provide scholarships and evidence-based support services to academically talented low-income students pursuing and completing STEM degrees. Three goals animate the design of this project. The first is to increase the diversity of students pursuing STEM disciplines. The second is to increase retention and completion of the MCC STEM Scholars. The third is to generate knowledge about specific ways project activities and other relevant factors influence the educational experiences and success of the scholarship recipients. Towards these goals the project's principal investigators will carry out a holistic and systematic range of activities. Such activities will include on-site outreach and recruitment efforts at area high schools with significant minority and low-income populations, on-going individual and cohort-based experiences designed to promote retention and student success, and embedded knowledge-generating efforts guided by a partnership between MCC and university researchers. Although community colleges possess a large pool of potential STEM talent, greater supports are needed to ensure that they can place their students on a promising path toward success, especially low-income students. Recent evidence has suggested that holistic, rather than singular approaches to student support offer greater benefits to community college student retention and completion. At the same time, while research has demonstrated the positive impact of multiple services and supports on community college student success, there remains limited evidence on precisely how and why such approaches work. Exploring such efforts can help identify the most effective strategies to improve student persistence and completion in STEM. This project not only integrates a variety of supports to assist community college students in succeeding in STEM, particularly those who are low-income and academically talented, but also examines how such efforts work and why. The empirical knowledge derived from the embedded research, assessment, and evaluation will inform small (and typically under-resourced) community colleges on how to reconcile and coordinate various institutional supports, as well as on how to institutionalize and sustain cost-effective, collaborative efforts to assist academically talented low-income STEM 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.