S-STEM: Training Masters-Level STEM Professionals to Address the Nations Water Resource Issues

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 Oregon State University (OSU). OSU provides several student support services focused on student well-being, academic-progress, careers, civic engagement, and leadership. Over its 72-month duration, this Track 2 project will fund scholarships to 40 unique full-time students pursuing graduate degrees in in the science, engineering, management, and public policy of water resources. The overall goal is to prepare low-income students and their communities to address water resource challenges by developing a more inclusive graduate experience that addresses the funding, mentoring, early research, and peer connection challenges that currently limit entrance into graduate programs. Active mentoring, guided research experiences and peer cohort building, all evidence-based strategies that nurture student engagement, self-efficacy and growth will be leveraged to enhance student success. Broader impacts of the project include the acceleration of the careers of low-income students into leadership positions within the field of Water Resources and the dissemination of findings to professionals in education research and ecological engineering disciplines. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of low-income, high-achieving undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. A companion goal is to prepare low-income students to engage with water resource issues by providing a holistic graduate experience that focuses lowering barriers encountered in funding, mentoring, early research, and peer networking that these students currently face. While there is evidence that active mentoring, guided research experiences and peer cohort building are strategies that generally nurture student belonging, self-efficacy and growth mindset, much less is known about how financially insecure individuals navigate barriers to graduate education. The project will generate and disseminate knowledge that will potentially boost retention of low-income undergraduate students in their final year and increase their recruitment into graduate degree programs. Formative and summative evaluation of the project will be guided by several evaluation questions including "To what degree does the program accomplish recruitment, retention and post-graduation transition into employment of under-resourced students?" The summative evaluation will use a mixed methods design with triangulated data to test the evaluation questions while the formative evaluation will be designed as ongoing feedback and improvement informed by empirical evidence in which evaluators work with team members to answer decision-relevant questions in a timely and project-focused way. Findings will be disseminated through the project website, the PIs personal web pages, blogposts, the STEM Center's website, professional meetings and conferences such as the Annual Meeting of American Water Resources Association and publications such as the Journal of the American Water Resources Association. 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.