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This research paper describes a preliminary analysis of panel summaries of proposals submitted to the National Science Foundation’s (NSF’s) Scholarships for Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (S-STEM) program. S-STEM provides awards to institutions to fund scholarships and to implement evidence-based strategies to recruit, retain, and graduate students from low-income backgrounds who have the academic potential to succeed in eligible STEM disciplines. The ultimate goal of the program is to build the US STEM workforce. In 2017, Rice University received funding from NSF to support teams of principal investigators and their co- investigators, who were experts in educational or related research areas, to attend a two-day workshop that was developed to help them prepare more competitive proposals to the S-STEM program. The emphasis was on investigators from predominantly undergraduate institutions, primarily those located in Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions and/or designated as Minority-Serving Institutions. One of the workshop’s aims was to investigate factors that impact the success (or lack thereof) of proposals to the S-STEM program. We began with examining the feedback participants received from review panels on their proposal submissions. In this case study, we compare panel summaries for five S-STEM proposals submitted from five different institutions, exploring the similarities and differences in the overall reviews, as well as the strengths and weaknesses cited for both awarded and declined proposals that were awarded and declined in the context of their alignment with NSF’s merit review criteria. This is submitted for consideration as a traditional paper presentation.
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