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Qualitative study examined development of psychosocial attributes- sense of belonging, science identity, and self-efficacy- among first-year life science undergraduate students who participated in integrated and culturally engaging research activities at a rural Hispanic Serving Institution (HSI). 

Although Hispanic population is growing rapidly, Latino students earn fewer STEM degrees than their peers. Therefore, it is mandatory to implement strategies that improve STEM retention and graduation rates for Hispanic students. There is little research about the ways in which multicampus collaborative CUREs combined with additional academic support, affect low-income, Hispanic students and none that focus solely on Puerto Rican students in STEM. Puerto Rico (PR) has a 99% Hispanic population; thus, it is imperative to include PR in education research literature. This study sought to examine the impacts of the Research for Improved Student Experiences (RISE) in STEM program at two campuses of the Inter American University of Puerto Rico. The program included multicampus collaborative CUREs, academic advising, and peer mentoring using quasi-experimental design. Impact assessment included psychosocial metrics such as self-efficacy, science identity and sense of belonging in a pre/posttest design. These findings were triangulated with the differences between treatment and control for retention, pass rate, and course grades. The findings revealed statistically significant improvements on all metrics. This study’s findings support multicampus collaborative CUREs, academic advising, and peer mentoring as useful and effective strategies for improving outcomes for low-income Hispanic students in Puerto Rico. 

Learning about evolution is a foundational part of biology education, but most current studies that explore college student evolution education are conducted at universities. However, community college students tend to be more diverse in characteristics shown to be related to evolution education outcomes. To explore how studies involving university students may generalize to community college students, we surveyed students from seven community college ( n = 202) and nine university ( n = 2288) classes. We measured students’ evolution interest, acceptance, and understanding, and for religious students, we measured their perceived conflict between their religions and evolution. Controlling for state and major, we found that community college students had similar levels of evolution interest as university students but perceived greater conflict between their religions and evolution. Further, community college students had lower evolution understanding and acceptance compared with university students. Religiosity was a strong factor predicting community college and university students’ evolution acceptance. However, unique to community college students, evolution understanding was not related to their macroevolution or human evolution acceptance. This indicates that, although some results between community college and university students are similar, there are differences that have implications for evolution instruction that warrant the need for more evolution education research at community colleges.