2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Our project, known as "University of California's Servingness," is dedicated to establishing a robust transfer pathway in Computing between California Community Colleges and the University of California system. The primary focus of our endeavor is to advance the transition from merely enrolling racially diverse students to genuinely serving them in ways that foster greater persistence, graduation rates, and career placement. We posit that universities can better exemplify the concept of "serving" Hispanic and Latinx, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students who attend predominantly white institutions by investing in effective transfer pathways. Eligibility for our program extends to students who meet two or more of the following criteria: being the first in their family to attend college, experiencing socio-economic challenges, and hailing from historically underrepresented groups in terms of both gender and race/ethnicity.

Through this NSF-funded project, we have been actively working to dismantle institutional barriers, adapt computing curricula at our partner institutions to local contexts, and, most importantly, elevate degree attainment and career placement by providing students with invaluable research experiences. A pivotal component of our project is the implementation of a summer program tailored to transfer students from our collaborating community colleges. This program aims to equip these students with crucial summer research experiences that deepen their understanding of computing research areas and smooth their transition into upper-division courses, all while stimulating their interest in pursuing advanced studies at the graduate level.

Given the growing availability of summer bridge programs for students in STEM fields at four-year institutions, it has become essential to assess the impact of such programs on a wide range of academic and non-academic indicators [1]. In this poster presentation, we will share our project's progress, experiences, and valuable lessons learned. Our objective is to illustrate the tangible impacts of our program on academic success metrics, psychosocial well-being, and department-level goals.

Moreover, we are keen on delving into the transformation in participants' perspectives concerning non-academic indicators, and we aim to determine whether this transformation varies across the two program modalities: online and in-person. To achieve this, we will employ A/B testing and a thorough evaluation of pre- and post-program score distributions [2, 3]. This research forms an essential part of our ongoing work as we strive to enhance the educational experience and future prospects of our diverse student body.

References:
[1] Ashley, M., Cooper, K. M., Cala, J. M., & Brownell, S. E. (2017). Building better bridges into STEM: A synthesis of 25 years of literature on STEM summer bridge programs. CBE—Life Sciences Education, 16(4), es3.
[2] Norouzi, N., Habibi, H., Robinson, C., & Sher, A. (2023, June). An Equity-minded Multi-dimensional Framework for Exploring the Dynamics of Sense of Belonging in an Introductory CS Course. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education V. 1 (pp. 131-137).
[3] Norouzi, N., & Robinson, C. (2022, March). Evaluation of the Impact of Modality for Equity Program. In Proceedings of the 54th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education V. 2 (pp. 1335-1335).