Becoming student ready: transforming institutional structures and cultures to support success for all students

Abstract

With initial funding from the National Science Foundation, we have created new programs to provide scholarships, mentored research experiences, and coordinated support programs to undergraduates who are typically underrepresented in STEM. For example, the graduation rate for our PERSIST Scholars rose to 88%, with especially significant gains for African-American students (49% to 95%) and Hispanic students (71% to 100%). Despite the successes of these cohort-focused programs, all of our students do not benefit from these interventions. This session will describe how we have been working holistically across The College of New Jersey (TCNJ) to address our institution's structural and cultural barriers to student success, and to close opportunity and achievement gaps. We will describe efforts in an array of interconnected areas, including: course and curricular structure and design; pedagogy, assessment strategies, and student evaluation; mentoring and academic advising; research and scholarship; faculty recruitment, recogntion, and reward; communications and interactive dialogue; and revisions to key documents. To better identify and develop an understanding of barriers within the School of Science, we created a Task Force focused on equity, inclusion, and changes in demographics and learning styles. The Task Force is charged with distilling the locally tested and tailored best practices identified through program-level and course-level innovations into recommendations for both focused interventions and sustained structural changes that help reduce outcome gaps. The recommendations focus on three domains: (a) Our role in course design and delivery, (b) Our interactions with students, and (c) Our understanding of students and their whole selves. For example, we have holistically redesigned our first-semester biology course. This foundational course was backward-designed, focuses on discovery and the process of science, uses a pedagogy centered on scientific teaching and creating an inclusive classroom and laboratory environment, and employs both pre- and postcourse assessments. We are working to expand this model across all of our first- and second-year courses in a coordinated way across the School of Science. Through significant recruitment efforts and new hiring protocols, we have increased the percentage of women faculty in the School of Science to 43%. To help further diversify our faculty, all our School of Science advertisements for faculty positions now require submission of a "Statement of Commitment to Inclusivity and Diversity" from each applicant. We have also worked to sustain, scale, and create new and expanded programs for our faculty. Among other mechanisms for substantive dialogue, we have a coordinated meeting schedule across the institution, and we use monthly School-wide and departmental meetings for interactive discussions and speakers focused on student success. We have updated our institutional mission, vision, core values, and strategic plan to emphasize TCNJ's commitment to inclusiveness and diversity, and to bring these front-and-center within our pivotal institutional documents. Moreover, we have included new language in our institutional tenure & promotion document to articulate how TCNJ values, recognizes, and rewards inclusion and diversity in these critically important processes for our faculty. We have also created a campus-wide Diversity Council within TCNJ's formal governance system.