2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Abstract

In recent decades, many universities have focused attention on retaining students in the STEM fields. A multitude of student success programs have cropped up on campuses across the country to support students in a variety of ways including financial, wellness, professional, and academic. Despite those well-intentioned efforts, low-income students still struggle to overcome the many advantages of their more privileged peers. Therefore, more research is needed to discover exactly what interventions result in positive outcomes for low-income students as well as when to intervene and with whom. The NSF-funded Scholarships in Science Technology Engineering and Math (S-STEM) grants support such research. S-STEM offers financial support in the form of scholarships to low-income domestic students in STEM fields in the context of thoughtfully designed student success programs which are based on theoretical frameworks and empirical evidence. The Endeavour Program at the University of Houston is one of those student success programs. The Endeavour Program provides low-income first-time-in-college (FTIC) students financial support through S-STEM scholarships as well as multi-faceted and engaging programming for the first two years of college. It is well known through the literature that higher engagement is linked to higher levels of academic performance and retention. Therefore, the focus of this program is to increase levels of engagement through various forms of activities and institutional support.

The long-term goal of the S-STEM program is to increase the number of low-income graduates in STEM fields. The overall objective of the program is to increase the retention of low-income students by fostering their behavioral, academic, cognitive, and affective engagement. Our central hypothesis is that participation in a small STEM learning community designed to increase engagement on multiple dimensions will improve student success outcomes for low-income students. This hypothesis is based on a large body of research suggesting that higher levels of engagement are related to increased levels of performance and retention. Additionally, the literature links hands-on and project-based activities to higher levels of engagement.

We plan to attain the overall objective by pursuing the following three specific aims:
1. Develop 1st- and 2nd-yr cornerstone courses that promote engagement, retention, and academic success of low-income STEM students.
2. Identify the relationship between different dimensions of engagement and academic performance and retention for low-income STEM students.
3. Develop a platform to identify warning signs of engagement that may give advisors an early indication that a student is at risk of leaving school.

The rationale for this research is that with a better understanding of how programs impact engagement and hence performance and retention, we can better design student success programs to optimize positive impacts on STEM student success measures for low-income students. This paper presents retention and academic performance (specific aim 1) results for the first three cohorts of the Endeavour Program. Initial findings suggest that participation in the program has a positive impact on student success measures and mitigates some of the risk factors associated with low-income students.