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In January 2020 East Carolina University (ECU) in partnership with Lenoir Community College (LCC), Pitt Community College (PCC), and Wayne Community College (WCC) was awarded an S-STEM Track 3 Grant (Grant number: 1930497). The purpose of this grant was to support low-income students at each partner institution, to research best practices in recruiting and retaining low-income students at both universities and community colleges, and to research how such programs influence the transfer outcomes from two-year to four-year schools. This grant provides scholarship support for two cohorts of students, one starting their engineering studies in Fall 2020 and the other starting their engineering studies in Fall 2021. Each cohort was to be comprised of 40 students including 20 students at ECU and 20 students divided among the three partnering community colleges. In addition to supporting student scholarships, this grant supported the establishment of new student support mechanisms and enhancement of existing support systems on each campus. This project involved the creation of a faculty mentoring program, designing a summer bridge program, establishing a textbook lending library, and enhancing activities for students in a living-learning community, expansion of university tutoring initiatives to allow access for community college students, and promoting a new peer mentoring initiative. The program emphasizes career opportunities including promoting on-campus career fairs, promoting internship and co-op opportunities, and bringing in guest speakers from various industry partners. A goal of the program was to allow community college students to build relationships with university students and faculty so they can more easily assimilate into the student body at the university upon transfer. This paper presents the challenges presented to the project in the first year and the pivoting that occurred due the pandemic. Data is presented regarding recruitment of scholars in both cohorts and retention of scholars from year 1 to year 2.
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A Rolling Stone: Evaluation of one NSF S-STEM Program through Successive Grant Periods
In 2008, Gannon University was awarded a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant, which provided scholarship funding in engineering and computer sciences for academically talented students having financial need. The program developed at Gannon University was designed to be quite extensive, providing an educational experience emphasizing not only technical mastery, but personal and professional development and community service through partnerships with nonprofit organizations in the local community. At the time of its development, the program was one-of-a-kind, providing a unique tool to marry technical education with the community-service mission of the university. The program developed and lessons learned through the four years of that grant activity were previously detailed in another publication. Since that first grant was implemented, two more such grants have been awarded which have allowed the program at Gannon University to continue and evolve. The second four-year grant award period has been completed, and the most recent grant activity is in the midst of its first year. In the current paper, the authors describe lessons taken from the first grant activity, responsive changes made in the second grant activity, further lessons taken from that second grant and proposed responses to be incorporated in the current iteration of the grant. Topics of this paper include additional features which have been implemented in order to foster better diversity in the program, observations about student motivation as a result of grant activities, thoughts on how to increase interdisciplinarity of projects, how to better and more effectively interact with “clients,” lessons taken about assessment of student progress (along with warning signs of imminent trouble) and planned actions to improve student success outcomes.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1643869
- PAR ID:
- 10089320
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2018 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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In 2008, Gannon University was awarded a National Science Foundation S-STEM grant, known as SEECS (Scholars of Excellence in Engineering and Computer Science) which provided scholarship funding for academically talented students having financial need. Since then, the grant has been funded twice more; the current award period started in 2017 and will run until 2021. As a requirement for the SEECS program, all students must participate in a community-based design project, undertaken for a non-profit entity in the local region. This project is nominally a two-year effort, though some projects have taken longer to complete. Recently, a project has experienced several significant setbacks: 1) the original project sponsor decommitted at the end of the first year due to funding concerns; 2) the project location changed four times due to uncertain sponsor requirement and city regulations; 3) the design itself has required substantial alteration several times due to unexpected circumstances (largely due to sponsor issues.) After two and a half years, the project remains only about 50% complete, still requiring additional system level design, installation and testing. This team of SEECS students has been coping with each “sharp turn” of the project as well as may be expected. They have produced design sketches, prototypes, and conference presentations. Yet signs of confusion, frustration, and low motivation level have been observed among students and have been evidenced through student satisfaction surveys, which are administered to all SEECS students each semester. This work-in progress paper details the evolution of student perceptions of the validity of the project, compares that evolution to historic data obtained from previous design groups, and speculates about the cause/effect relationship between externally-imposed design changes and student perceptions. In particular, the effect of design changes on student enthusiasm and sense of purpose is to be examined. Preliminary conclusions and trends will be drawn from the study. The periodic evaluation, adjustment and intervention of advising will be suggested to guide students to fully benefit from such real-life project experience.more » « less
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This paper is the second in a series of annual papers about the role 2-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) have in educating technicians from underrepresented groups and how the National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored HSI Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Hub program supports faculty at HSIs in improving Hispanic/Latinx student success. The goal of the HSI ATE Hub project is to build capacity and leadership at 2-year HSIs for developing competitive ATE proposals to NSF to prepare technicians in advanced technologies that drive the American economy. Funded by the NSF ATE Program, the HSI ATE Hub is a three-year collaborative project implemented by Florence Darlington Technical College in South Carolina and the Science Foundation Arizona Center for STEM at Arizona State University. Last year’s paper described the research need, provided a project overview, included baseline and initial data, and discussed early lessons learned and their implications for future research. This paper describes continued fostering of the HSI ATE community (2-year HSIs with grant prospects and awards from the NSF ATE Program), resource dissemination, usage, perceived value to the community, and additional data gathered during the first and second cohorts of HSI ATE Hub, including adjustments based on learnings from year 1. Emphasis will be placed on HSI ATE Community building and resources. Lessons learned and implications for future research are also described in the paper.more » « less
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