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The 2017 NSF INCLUDES “Conference to Advance the Collective Impact of Retention and Continuation Strategies for Hispanics and Other Underrepresented Minorities in STEM Fields” was held at the Kellogg Conference Center on the Gallaudet University campus in Washington, D.C., on March 6-8th, 2017. The conference brought together 74 researchers, higher education administrators, industry representatives, members of professional societies, and other community members from regions across the United States. Participants shared their experiences and expertise in broadening participation in STEM fields and in identifying strategies to improve outcomes for Hispanics, women, and other underrepresented groups in STEM fields. Panels focused on lessons learned about collective impact, the K-12 pipeline to college and the importance of community, Latino student success in two-year institutions, increasing Latino retention in undergraduate STEM programs, recruitment of highly competitive Latinos and other underrepresented minorities into graduate schools and strategies for successful completion of graduate studies, and industry partnerships to identify a diverse workforce. Panel and keynote presentations focused on evidence-based knowledge, leveraging findings from disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields and from differing types of institutions and educational levels to determine whether strategies identified can yield large-scale progress towards INCLUDES goals. In addition, small breakout sessions offered opportunities for attendees to share their ideas on (1) lessons learned from collective impact projects; (2) obstacles confronting students at various points and in different sectors of the education, career, and industry STEM pathways; and (3) best practices for overcoming barriers and ensuring that the strategies identified would be successful in different contexts.
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Identifying and Disseminating Transformative Professional Development of STEM Undergraduates Who Perform Outreach: Progress in Year 1
To teach STEM content to K-12 students and to recruit talented and diverse K-12 students into STEM, many outreach programs at universities in the United States rely on STEM undergraduates. While the design of such outreach typically focuses on the K-12 students who are taught or recruited, an important but often overlooked consideration is the effect of the outreach on the professional development of the STEM undergraduates themselves. This proposed EAGER project seeks to determine which outreach programs in the United States provided the most transformative professional development of the participating STEM undergraduates. This project then seeks to capture the essence what practices in those programs provided transformative professional development. Next, the project seeks to disseminate these practices to a network of institutions doing outreach. Supporting this project is the NSF EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program. In this first year of the project, we performed a systematic review of literature and university websites with follow-up survey data to identify outreach programs that may be transformative for STEM undergraduates. This review yielded a matrix of about 100 college-based outreach programs. We then invited these programs to attend one of the following workshops: a March workshop held at Tufts University in Boston or an April workshop held at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Nine institutions sent representatives to the Boston workshop, and five institutions sent representatives to the Lincoln workshop. In addition, we held conference calls to gather information from an additional six institutions. The purpose of the workshops and conference calls was two-fold: (1) determine best practices for outreach that used STEM undergraduates, and (2) determine what in those programs provided the most transformative development of the participating STEM undergraduates. This paper presents preliminary results from these workshops and conference calls.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1752096
- PAR ID:
- 10119302
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- ASEE annual conference & exposition
- ISSN:
- 2153-5965
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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