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

该项目将通过支持D‘Youville学院有经济需求的高成就、低收入学生的留校和毕业，来促进国家对受过良好教育的科学家、数学家、工程师和技术人员的需求。在为期五年的时间里，该项目将为13名正在攻读生物学学士学位的全日制学生提供奖学金。生物学专业的一年级学生将获得四年奖学金。该项目旨在通过将教师指导、队列建设、ePortfolios和游戏化课程嵌入生物课程来增加持久性并培养学生的STEM认同感。实习和研究经验将使学者、教师和当地行业受益。该项目将为生物教育领域贡献新的知识，并将有助于解决纽约西部地区对高素质生物学家的迫切需求。这个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的生物学学位毕业率。通过这个项目，D‘Youville大学将实现以下目标：(1)招募不同的申请者，并为13名低收入、有学术天赋但经济需求未得到满足的学生提供奖学金；(2)为该队列实现80%的第一年保留率和70%的四年毕业率；(3)为100%的学者提供职业发展活动，以提高他们毕业后获得STEM就业或进入研究生学位课程的成功；以及(4)研究生物学教学中的创新游戏化方法和ePortfolios的使用如何影响STEM低收入生物学专业学生的参与度、成功和STEM身份认同。游戏化是一种高影响力的实践，可以提高学生对计算机科学的参与度，ePortfolios是一种展示了高影响力的实践，可以广泛地建立STEM身份。然而，在生物学中使用游戏化和ePortfolios的文献中存在空白；为该项目收集的数据将有助于填补这些空白。除了教育研究，混合方法、了解文化的评估将探索该计划对所需指标(即，参与者的归属感、自我效能感、坚持性和对STEM的保持)的潜在影响。传播活动将以D‘Youville社区、当地K-12社区、STEM行业以及广泛的国家利益攸关方为目标。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 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.