Recruiting,Educating, and Graduating a Diverse Community of Mathematicians Through Mentoring, Peer Support, and Undergraduate Research

该项目将通过支持高成就、低收入、有经济需求的学生在Towson大学留校和毕业来促进国家对有技能的数学家的需求。在五年的时间里，该项目将为32名正在攻读数学本科学位的独特的全日制学生提供奖学金。该项目将向两个组别的初一学生颁发14个四年制奖学金，并向三个组别的学生提供18个两年制奖学金，以转移学生。该项目将在当地从巴尔的摩城市学校和地区社区学院招聘，包括哈福德社区学院和霍华德社区学院。该项目将通过支持学者的学术和专业发展来提高他们的教育经验。这些支持包括增强的建议和指导，为数学专业的学生开设的职业道路课程，以及编程研讨会和黑客松。该项目还将通过新的以二年级/三年级课程为基础的本科生研究经验来支持学者参与本科生研究，以及帮助申请暑期研究经验。该项目的学生支持活动将适用于所有数学专业的学生，扩大项目的影响，超出奖学金获得者的范围。该项目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。该项目将使用验证性分析来评估项目组成部分，并使用决策树分析来确定对学者实现教育目标影响最大的因素。验证性分析将检验两个假设。首先，该项目的组成部分代表了学术整合的可观察和累积的证据，因此可以预测在六年内获得数学学士学位的毕业生。其次，这些部分的学生经历代表了学生在学校中融入社会的证据，并预测了参加/完成每一部分内容的个人的毕业和累计GPA。决策树分析将在包括学生记录和人口统计数据以及作为验证性分析的一部分收集的所有数据的数据集上执行。通过分析这些丰富的数据集，该项目应该能够得出更微妙的结论，说明哪些干预措施对支持低收入家庭学生在数学上取得成功最有价值。项目成果将在联合数学会议、MathFest和参考出版物中传播。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 project will contribute to the national need for skilled mathematicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at Towson University. Over its five-year duration, the project will provide scholarships to 32 unique full-time students who are pursuing undergraduate degrees in mathematics. The project will award 14 four-year scholarships to first-time, first-year students across two cohorts, and 18 two-year scholarships to transfer students across three cohorts. The project will recruit locally from Baltimore city schools and from area community colleges including Harford Community College and Howard Community College. The project will enhance Scholars’ educational experience by supporting their academic and professional development. Such supports include enhanced advising and mentoring, a course on career pathways for mathematics majors, and coding workshops and hackathons. The project will also support Scholar’s engagement in undergraduate research through a new sophomore/junior level course-based undergraduate research experience, as well as assistance in applying for a summer research experience. The project’s student support activities will be available to all mathematics majors, expanding project impact beyond the scholarship recipients.The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. The project will use confirmatory analysis to assess project components and decision tree analysis to identify the factors that most impact the Scholar’s attainment of educational goals. Confirmatory analysis will examine two hypotheses. First, that components of the project represent observable and cumulative evidence of academic integration, and therefore predict graduation with a mathematics baccalaureate degree within six years. Second, the student experience of these components represents evidence of social integration of the student in the institution and predict graduation and cumulative GPA for the subset of individuals who attended/completed each element. Decision tree analysis will be performed on a data set that includes student records and demographic data, as well as all data collected as part of the confirmatory analysis. By analyzing this rich data set, the project should be able to draw more nuanced conclusions about which interventions are the most valuable for supporting the success of low-income students in mathematics. Project results will be disseminated in the Joint Mathematics Meetings, MathFest, and in refereed publications. 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.