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1. Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--34894  

   Goodman, Katherine; Ivey, Stephanie; Stewart, Craig; O'Brien, Shani; Darbeheshti, Maryam; Schupbach, William; Alfrey, Karen (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition)

   The Urban STEM Collaboratory is a tri-institution collaboration of (school 1), (school 2), and (school 3). Each of the three partner universities is embedded in a large city, and serve similar student populations, i.e. students who tend to be first generation, minorities, older, and/or commuting to campus. These universities encounter similar challenges in first-year retention and graduation rates, especially in the STEM disciplines. As they strive to improve the first year engineering and/or mathematics student experience at their campuses, they have engaged in different approaches; including Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL), formation of an Engineering Learning Community (ELC), and engaging students in outreach as STEM Ambassadors. Incorporating these individual strengths with new activities that will be shared across institutions, the team is currently embarking on a multi-year research project to uncover how students develop STEM identity in an urban context, identify interventions that support this development, and determine the impact that STEM identity has on student success. Through the support of an NSF S-STEM grant, the three universities are also providing scholarships to students engaged in the project. Here, we share the initial efforts of our tri-campus interaction and collaboration, our overarching goals, our systems of recruiting students, and our initial collection of preliminary data and findings for Year 1. 

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2. Urban STEM Collaboratory After Two Years: A Multi-institutional Approach to the Success of Financially Disadvantaged Students

   Russomanno, D J; Ivey, S; Campbell, J; Robinson, A; Stewart, CO; Alfrey, K; Watt, J; Chase, T; Darbeheshti, M; Howland_Cummings, M; et al (September 2023, Journal for STEM Education Research)

   The Urban STEM Collaboratory is a five-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that addresses challenges to student success in STEM disciplines through a multi-institutional collaboration via the University of Memphis (UofM), University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), and Indiana University--Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Study groups, tutoring, peer and faculty mentoring, and career exploration programs are being used across the three campuses to increase the participants’ commitment to a STEM field. Innovative features from Course Networking (CN) software are being deployed to provide scholars with evidence of their learning journey while expanding a meaningful academic cloud-based social network. This paper extends a previous introductory ASEE conference paper titled: “Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory,” (Goodman et al., 2020), which outlined the initial efforts of the tri-campus collaboration. The purpose of the present paper is to summarize the impact of the project, including data analysis of effectiveness, for Year 1: 2019-2020 and Year 2: 2020-2021. Although still in progress, with the longitudinal efficacy of several of the project’s components undetermined, the project’s organizational structure, activities, and findings to date should be of value to others conducting or proposing projects with similar goals. 

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3. Urban STEM Collaboratory After Two Years: A Multi-institutional Approach to the Success of Financially Disadvantaged Students

   Ivey, S; Campbell, J; Robinson, A; Stewart, CO; Russomanno, D J; Alfrey, K; Chase, T; Darbeheshti, M; Howland_Cummings, M; Goodman, K (September 2023, Journal of STEM Education)

   The Urban STEM Collaboratory is a five-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that addresses challenges to student success in STEM disciplines through a multi-institutional collaboration via the University of Memphis (UofM), University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), and Indiana University--Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Study groups, tutoring, peer and faculty mentoring, and career exploration programs are being used across the three campuses to increase the participants’ commitment to a STEM field. Innovative features from Course Networking (CN) software are being deployed to provide scholars with evidence of their learning journey while expanding a meaningful academic cloud-based social network. This paper extends a previous introductory ASEE conference paper titled: “Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory,” (Goodman et al., 2020), which outlined the initial efforts of the tri-campus collaboration. The purpose of the present paper is to summarize the impact of the project, including data analysis of effectiveness, for Year 1: 2019-2020 and Year 2: 2020-2021. Although still in progress, with the longitudinal efficacy of several of the project’s components undetermined, the project’s organizational structure, activities, and findings to date should be of value to others conducting or proposing projects with similar goals. 

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4. Creating and Assessing an Upper Division Additive Manufacturing Course and Laboratory to Enhance Undergraduate Research and Innovation

   Maloney, P; Cong, W; Zhang, M; Li, B. (June 2019, Proceedings of the American Society of Engineering Education)

   Additive manufacturing (AM) is prevalent in academic, industrial, and layperson use for the design and creation of objects via joining materials together in a layer upon layer fashion. However, few universities have an undergraduate course dedicated to it. Thus, using NSF IUSE support [grant number redacted for review] from the Exploration and Design Tier of the Engaged Student Learning Track, this project has created and implemented such a course at three large universities: Texas Tech (a Carnegie high research productivity and Hispanic Serving Institution), Kansas State (a Carnegie high research productivity and land grant university) and California State, Northridge (the largest of all the California State campuses and highly ranked in serving underprivileged students). Our research team includes engineering professors and a sociologist trained in assessment and K-12 outreach to determine the effects of the course on the undergraduate and high school students. We are currently in year two of the three years of NSF support. 

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5. Using Design-based Research Methods to Scale in an Expanding Intervention

   Boyer, D. M.; & Duncan, L. A. (July 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   In this work-in-progress paper, we present design-based methodological work intended to support implementation of a large-scale, ongoing NSF Scholarships in STEM (S-STEM) project. We have created pilot tools and procedures for data collection and analysis that will supply consistent research throughlines during the project lifespan while also providing iterations of formative feedback about participants’ needs and their experiences in the project. While these tools and procedures have allowed us to analyze pilot data, in each year of the project, participant numbers will continue to grow, placing additional demands on our research team and our chosen methods. Will the designs we have created help us to scale effectively while remaining fidelitous to our project goals? The purpose of the S-STEM project is to connect student pathways at state technical colleges to Engineering and Computer Sciences programs at a Research I university in the southeastern United States. Toward this goal, we are implementing communities of practice and cognitive apprenticeship strategies to support student cohorts and create programming aspects to enhance transfer students’ enculturation to the university, completion of STEM-related degrees, and placement in the industrial workforce. Cohorts begin at the technical colleges, guided by a doctoral student mentor who engages program participants in applied research and shepherds them throughout their transition to the university. Now in the second year of the project, the pilot cohort is studying at the university while new cohorts are engaged at the collaborating technical colleges. Each year, the number of students participating in the five-year implementation will accumulate to a proposed total of over 300 students. Our research team will need to scale our efforts toward project fidelity. Our intent with this work-in-progress paper is to share our current status and invite interested colleagues to provide feedback about our pilot analysis work and our plans for future data. We will introduce the design-based methods that inform both research and development in our project. In particular, we will focus on the applicability of these methods for implementation work and how they can be effectively scaled to large interventions. We will describe observation, interview and focus group, and survey methods, along with how these methods complement academic sources and other student-related data. 

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