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Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) Engineering Scholars Program at a Two-Year College: Preliminary Interventions and Outcomes

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Conference

2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access

Location

Virtual Conference

Publication Date

July 26, 2021

Start Date

July 26, 2021

End Date

July 19, 2022

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topics

Diversity and NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

15

DOI

10.18260/1-2--37700

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/37700

Download Count

228

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Paper Authors

biography

Elizabeth A. Adams Fresno City College

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Dr. Elizabeth Adams teaches full time as an Engineering Faculty member at Fresno City College in Fresno, California. She a civil engineer with a background in infrastructure design and management, and project management. Her consulting experience spanned eight years and included extensive work with the US military in Japan, Korea, and Hawaii. In 2008 Elizabeth shifted the focus of her career to education and academia, later receiving her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering and Sustainable Water Resources. Her work highlights a commitment to undergraduate engineering education and its improvement through best teaching practices. Her research efforts target ways to support and encourage diversity among students and how to create an inclusive learning environment.

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Carol Haden Magnolia Consulting, LLC

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Dr. Carol Haden is Vice President of Magnolia Consulting, LLC, a woman-owned, small business specializing in independent research and evaluation. She has served as evaluator for STEM education projects sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and the Arizona Department of Education, among others. Areas of expertise include evaluations of engineering education curricula and programs, engineering communities of practice, informal education and outreach programs, STEM teacher development, and climate change education programs.

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Claire L. A. Dancz Clemson University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-4359-8041

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Dr. Claire L.A. Dancz is a Research Associate for Education Systems at the Watt Family Innovation Center and Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Engineering and Science Education at Clemson University.

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Yushin Ahn California State University at Fresno

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Yushin Ahn received the B. Eng. Degree in civil engineering and the M.Sc. degree in surveying and digital photogrammetry from Inha University, Korea in 1998 and 2000, and the M.sc. and Ph.D. degree in geodetic science from the Ohio State University, Columbus, in 2005 and 2008 respectively. After three years of post-doctoral researcher at Byrd Polar Research Center, he joined Surveying Engineering at Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI for six years.

He is currently an assistant professor of Civil and Geomatics Engineering, California State University at Fresno, CA. His research interests include digital photogrammetry, feature tracking, and sensor calibration and integration.

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Karen Willis Fresno City College

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Karen Willis has been a teaching mathematics at the two-year community college level for 6 years, as well as 3 years at the university level. Karen has several years of experience in tutorial coordinating and tutor training, as well as participating as a faculty mentor for engineering scholars. She loves to foster collaboration in the classroom between students so they can learn to work and grow together.

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Abstract

This paper reports on Year 1 evaluation results and subsequent Year 2 interventions and activities of an NSF Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) at Fresno City College, a two-year college in Fresno, California. The results illustrate the effectiveness of the program's support interventions for student cohorts in achieving the overall program goal of increasing persistence of engineering students along pathways to graduation and beyond. Fresno City College, in Fresno California, is located is in a metro area that has one of the highest rates of concentrated poverty in the US. As a result, students face challenges of unemployment, endemic poverty, and low levels of educational attainment. The Engineering Scholars Program is designed to support students with these challenges in mind. Scholarships are awarded to cohorts of eight students each year, and are renewable for up to two years providing students maintain eligibility. In addition to scholarship money scholar cohorts are provided with a suite of support interventions including seminars, events, faculty mentoring, peer mentoring, academic advising, and participation in undergraduate research in collaboration with California State University, Fresno. Year 1 Evaluation results were overwhelmingly positive along each of the major program support interventions. The goals of the S-STEM as proposed are to 1) Create a diverse and welcoming STEM climate on the community college campus through events and media that encourage broader participation. 2) Increase participation in engineering among economically disadvantaged students through targeted outreach and recruitment. 3) Increase persistence of engineering students along discipline specific pathways to transfer and graduation from four-year universities through a series of structured support interventions. And, 4) Establish on-going collaborative transfer support processes between the Fresno City College engineering program and CSU-Fresno. Year 1 evaluation results highlight how the program cohort student support interventions promote the achievement of each of these goals. Results indicate that students are engaged in the support and intervention activities conducted by program faculty and are finding them useful in supporting them to understand engineering and engineering research. Scholars valued the mentoring they received from faculty members in assisting them with course work, providing resources to help them be successful in their classes and supporting them in their degree pathways. They also benefited from the personal support mentors provided including encouragement to persist, helping them manage personal and academic challenges, and giving them insight into their future careers. Evaluation findings show that scholars appreciate the opportunity to be part of a community of classmates and faculty members. This extended to their undergraduate research experiences which offered community college students an opportunity to interact with professors at a four-year university. Future findings from this project will create new knowledge in understanding how socio-cultural context of students from such underserved areas experience community and develop a STEM identity. The project research team hypothesizes that engaging students in a collaborative cohort experience will support students’ movement from the periphery of learning to the center of the community where learning is a collective experience guided by community membership and that this process will enable students to develop a strong STEM identity.

Adams, E. A., & Haden, C., & Dancz, C. L. A., & Ahn, Y., & Willis, K. (2021, July), Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (S-STEM) Engineering Scholars Program at a Two-Year College: Preliminary Interventions and Outcomes Paper presented at 2021 ASEE Virtual Annual Conference Content Access, Virtual Conference. 10.18260/1-2--37700

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2021 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015