2025 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD)

Spurred by longstanding concerns about inequities in STEM learning outcomes, including among students in a university’s growing engineering and computer science programs, a small team of faculty and staff at a midsized university undertook an institution-wide initiative to understand its entire STEM learning environment, i.e., the conditions that inform student learning inside and outside of the classroom. But first, however, the team had to determine how best to develop and implement a manageable, multi-level self-study that could offer meaningful insights into the complexity of barriers to STEM student success—and then begin to propose meaningful solutions. This paper describes how a diverse campus team designed and implemented such a self-study, and how a similar approach can be adapted for use at other institutions of higher learning seeking to improve STEM student success. The work described here is one part of a larger study that is still ongoing.