Barriers to success: understanding the student experience
Date
2018-03Author
Gazley, J. Lynn
Van der Sandt, Suriza
Nayak, Sudhir
Pulimood, Monisha
Chan, Benny C.
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Abstract
At The College of New Jersey, faculty from the School of Science have partnered with the institutional Educational Opportunity Fund (EOF) program to revitalize the existing STEM Summer Scholars bridge program in order to increase the success rates of students coming from low-income backgrounds. With funding from the National Science Foundation (Award # 1525109), TCNJ's FIRSTS project (Foundation for Increasing & Retaining STEM Students) allowed the team to enhance the summer curriculum and conduct a mixed method, longitudinal research project to both evaluate the program and conduct basic, transferable research on how students persist and succeed in STEM majors. The Summer Scholars program design builds on national best practices through a theory-driven approach, drawing on social science research that suggests a robust "science identity" plays an important role in STEM persistence, particularly when taking into account the ways that gender, race, and ethnicity can shape students' engagement and aspirations (Chang et al. 2011; Tonso 2006). A science identity comprises multiple domains that develop at different rates depending on individual experiences and access to resources (Gazley et al. 2014). Such resources for identity formation include cultural capital—the knowledge and ways of being that people use to thrive in different social arenas—and may be cultivated through appropriately designed and executed interventions that provide a "practice space" where students can exercise new skills (or new uses of old skills) (Ovink and Veazey 2010). Our data collection focuses on how students identify, use, and deploy resources from their environment to inform their science identities and support healthy resilience strategies that help them succeed in college and as STEM majors. This rich dataset allows us to compare "thriving" (GPA >3.25 in a STEM major) and "persisting" (GPA <3.0 in a STEM major) students, rather than simply focusing on students who have transferred out of STEM. For this presentation, we use qualitative analysis of interviews with students at the beginning and end of their first years to identify the barriers students face and successful (and unsuccessful) resilience strategies students employ to navigate these barriers. We then contextualize student experiences within the broader pattern of student success at the College using quantitative data and interviews with non-program students who have left STEM majors.
Citation:
Gazley, J. L., Van der Sandt, S., Nayak, S., Pulimood, M., & Chan, B. C. (2018, March 2-4). Barriers to success: Understanding the student experience [Conference presentation]. 10th Conference on Understanding Interventions that Broaden Participation in Science Careers, Baltimore, Maryland, United States.
Description
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
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https://s3.wp.wsu.edu/uploads/sites/90/2018/03/10THConferenceAgenda-Detail.pdfhttp://dr.tcnj.edu/handle/2900/4249