Building a Community in STEM for Rural Low-Income Students

About This Grant

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 Monmouth College, a private liberal arts college that is a rural-serving institution in Western Illinois. Over its 6-year duration, this Track 1 project will fund scholarships to 15 unique full-time students who are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in biochemistry, biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, mathematics, neuroscience, and/or physics. First year students will receive the scholarship for 4 years and transfer students will receive the scholarship for up to 3 years. This project will increase recruitment, retention, and persistence in the STEM disciplines by combining scholarship support with outreach to the local high schools, development and deployment of a multifaceted mentoring program (with faculty, peers, and profession scientists as mentors), focused and intentional cohort formation, and early participation in scientific research. As the S-STEM Scholars progress in their college careers, they will build STEM professional identities as they have the opportunity to present their research findings at professional conferences and to interact with commercial and industrial partners. They will continue to grow through service, by serving as mentors for the younger students at Monmouth College and by participating in outreach activities with the local high school students. All aspects of the activities will increase a scholarship recipient's sense of belonging in STEM. This project will increase the participation of groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM (low-income rural students) and will increase the number of STEM graduates entering the workforce, which will help meet the labor needs of the Western Illinois region and the United States. Through the evaluation of the project's activities, the project will contribute knowledge to the STEM education field by determining which of these activities are important for persistence in STEM. The project will demonstrate the significance of possible recruitment and retention pathways for low-income students and may be used as a model by similar institutions. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of academically talented, low-income undergraduate students with demonstrated financial needs. The specific aims are to recruit and to award 15 scholarships to academically talented students with financial need and have 80% (12) of the scholarship recipients graduate with a STEM bachelor's degree and enter the STEM workforce or graduate school within a year of graduation. Rural economically disadvantaged students (who often attend colleges like Monmouth College) face many challenges in attending and persisting in college: unfamiliarity with applying to college and procuring financial aid, underestimating the college workload (particularly for the STEM disciplines), and not understanding how to navigate their education and the opportunities that are provided by the college experience. These students often come from under-resourced high schools where they have little exposure to STEM and therefore do not understand the possible benefits of a career in STEM. This project recognizes their special needs and will work to support them. This project will examine the effects of various supports (personalized mentoring with a foundation in competency-based learning, seminar series that seek to introduce students to academic and career pathways, research experiences that increase self-efficacy and confidence) on the persistence of the scholars in the STEM disciplines. Qualitative and quantitative data will be gathered (academic and career outcomes, questionnaires, surveys, focus groups, etc.) to investigate which activities contributed to academic retention, graduation, and career placement, with the goal of identifying activities that have a significant effect on a student's career trajectory. In order to disseminate results to the general public, a web page for this project will be added to the Monmouth College website. The project results will also be disseminated through presentations at disciplinary specific conferences as well as through manuscripts in peer-reviewed STEM and academic journals. 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.