Program Seeks to Develop Military and Civilian Leaders in STEM
By Audrey Malagon, Lead Editor of DUE Point, Virginia Wesleyan University
The National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM programs provide scholarships and opportunities for low-income students to excel in STEM fields. At Norwich University, the oldest Senior Military College in the country, their goal is to develop S-STEM scholars into leaders in both the military and civilian STEM workforce. Here, PI Darlene Olsen tells us about their approach to this program.
What inspired you to apply to this grant program?
I attended an NSF-funded workshop at Rice University designed to improve the competitiveness of proposals from predominantly undergraduate institutions. The workshop focused in particular on institutions, like Norwich, that are located in Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) jurisdictions. The workshop opened my eyes to the impact this program has on students from underserved populations who are pursuing degrees in STEM. I am particularly proud of the educational experience Norwich offers its students and, with this program, I hope to make this experience affordable for all.
Tell us more about the academic supports you designed for students in the program. How did you decide on them?
As an institution, we know that students who enter college underprepared in mathematics are less likely to graduate within STEM disciplines. With the S-STEM program, we are working to improve outcomes for students that are placed into precalculus. Typically the curriculum for the STEM disciplines has calculus as the entry level mathematics course; thus enrollment in precalculus can delay students’ progress towards graduation, compounding the financial burden for low-income students.
One goal of the S-STEM program is to implement and assess a corequisite course model of precalculus and calculus that will keep students on track to complete STEM degrees within four years. This corequisite course model delivers the content of calculus with contextualized instruction of precalculus as needed. This course has an additional class meeting time in comparison to the standard first semester calculus course.
Another goal of the program is to implement and assess training for peer tutors in mathematics courses. S-STEM scholars and sophomore level STEM students will have the opportunity to enroll in a course to learn content knowledge and leadership skills to serve as peer tutors for precalculus. This has the additional objective of improving the peer tutors' communication and leadership skills with beneficial outcomes for the workforce.
How will your program’s impact reach beyond Norwich University?
Determining the success of the corequisite model of precalculus/calculus and the leadership training of student tutors provides valuable information for other institutions with STEM programs. Recruiting, retaining, and graduating students from low socioeconomic backgrounds from Vermont and across the nation in the STEM disciplines supports the local tech workforce and increases the pool of STEM talent for both the military and civilian workforce.
What have you learned so far in this project?
Norwich University has just completed the first year of funding. Recruiting and building the cohort structure of the program has been the largest challenge especially with the restrictions of COVID. The timing of the award beginning during the spring semester has also raised issues with preventing early marketing and advertising of the program to high school students; this may have also impacted recruitment.
Despite these challenges, the implementation of the corequisite course has been successful thus far. This course was offered face-to-face despite the pandemic. In comparison with the students enrolled in precalculus, preliminary findings show that there is a higher retention rate and grade point average for those students enrolled in the corequisite course. Students were appreciative of being placed in the corequisite course rather than precalculus. However, managing course registration to implement a randomized controlled experiment was challenging and the experimental groups were not uniform.
How has this program impacted students and faculty?
The program has encouraged more conversations within the Mathematics Department on how to improve our first year sequence in mathematics. I have personally found working with the Educational Researcher and Evaluator eye-opening and rewarding. The success thus far has inspired one of the junior faculty in the department to already think about the next iteration of the S-STEM program and associated research questions.
Additionally, at the S-STEM Symposium hosted by AAAS and the NSF, several S-STEM students shared stories of their success in college and in STEM disciplines with the support of these scholarships. While our program is new, I hope that we will be able to have similar success stories.
Learn more about NSF DUE (#)1930263
Full Project Name: Promoting Success of Undergraduate STEM Students Through Scholarships, Mentoring, and Curricular Improvements in First-year Mathematics Courses
Abstract Link: https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1930263
Project Contact: Darlene Olsen, Norwich University, dolsen1@norwich.edu
*Responses in this blog were edited for length and clarity.