S-STEM: Scholarships for an Undergraduate STEM Access and Inclusion Nexus

About This Grant

This project, Scholarships for an Undergraduate STEM Access and Inclusion Nexus (SUSTAIN), 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 Bradley University (BU). BU is a top-ranked mid-sized private university in Peoria, Illinois, that offers a wide variety of STEM majors and an innovative minor in Sustainability. Over its six-year duration, this Track 2 project will fund scholarships to 22 unique full-time student Scholars who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in mechanical or civil engineering, biology, chemistry, or biochemistry. First-year students will receive up to four years of scholarship support. The project aims to increase student persistence in STEM fields through a holistic approach to provide scholarship recipients with evidence-based interventions and supports, including an orientation bridge program, faculty and near-peer mentoring, shared sustainability-focused intellectual experiences, early engagement in undergraduate research, foundational and financial supports, and training for faculty mentors. The project will include a SUSTAIN Peers group (low-income STEM students not selected for the scholarship) that will increase the size of the SUSTAIN community and allow investigation of the degree to which support activities without financial support have an impact. Scholar and Peer involvement in outreach activities will benefit the local community and future STEM students. The sustainability theme will orient students to address globally important issues through the responsible application of science and engineering. SUSTAIN will be a powerful mechanism to broaden participation in the STEM workforce. The project is designed to substantially improve outcomes for low-income STEM students, advance the understanding of the practices and infrastructure needed to effectively support such students, and offer insights that could be critical for enhancing STEM education and career pathways. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of high-achieving, low-income undergraduates with demonstrated financial need, and ultimately inform and enact a transformational shift in the understanding of and support for BU’s low–income STEM students. Evidence-based student support services and programs that are novel to BU and augment existing supports will be implemented to accomplish the following objectives: 1) Recruitment: Enroll, award scholarships, and support 22 academically talented, low-income students as SUSTAIN Scholars; 2) Retention: Increase first-to-second year retention for SUSTAIN-eligible students by 5%; 3) Identity: Increase STEM identity, self-efficacy, and sense of belonging to the BU community; 4) Graduation: Increase 6-year graduation rate by 10%; 5) Placement: Increase the number of graduates entering employment or post-graduate study in a STEM field after graduation to 95% or above; and 6) Knowledge Generation: Generate and disseminate evidence about the degree to which and how the implementation of a suite of interventions novel to BU and contextualized in the Persistence Framework model contributes towards retention, identity, graduation, and placement outcomes. Utilizing measures of STEM identity and self-efficacy with low-income students at a mid-size private university presents a unique opportunity to fill several gaps in the current research landscape, including understanding how STEM identity develops among low-income students in such institutions. The project will investigate the degree to which novel interventions organized under the Persistence Framework model contribute towards the retention, identity, and graduation of economically disadvantaged students in STEM fields. This project will be evaluated using a 360-degree assessment and feedback process to collect performance and self-appraisal information from multiple perspectives. The results of this project will be made available by presenting at national conferences, publishing findings in relevant journals, and facilitating sustainable implementation of successful interventions in the participating programs and other STEM programs at BU. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of academically talented, low-income 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.