Could not find session

2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The Critical Need to Support Student Parents in S-STEM Programs Designed to Support Transfer Student Success

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

This is a work-in-progress paper. Mirroring national trends, student parents are a critical yet overlooked group in California’s higher education systems. Per California Competes: Higher Education for a Strong Economy, a nonpartisan research and policy organization, “California’s 300,000+ student parents have greater financial need than their non-parenting peers and are less likely to complete a degree or certificate, despite having higher GPAs.” Investments in low-income student parents can yield significant returns by improving college access, increasing degree attainment, and enhancing workforce readiness in high-demand fields. These investments strengthen economic competitiveness and create multigenerational benefits, enabling low-income student parents to achieve economic mobility while expanding opportunities for their children. Efforts to support parenting students moving from community college into B.S.-granting engineering and computer science programs often fail to account for their caregiving responsibilities. This oversight hinders student parent curricular and co-curricular participation and academic and professional success. In addition, little research on parenting students attends to the specifics of engineering and computer science-focused majors, with high out-of-class-time participation expectations and expectations that each student will participate in at least one summer internship or co-op, which typically require students to move for one or more academic terms. This paper shares how we “learned to see and center” student parents in an existing S-STEM partnership and develop a new approach to S-STEM program implementation and research design – including the utilization of tools from the 2023 California Competes Student Parent Policy Agenda as a resource and a research agenda asking how student parents are utilizing their strengths to support their academic and professional success, what supports and interventions have effective outcomes for student parents, and how can these be maintained over time?

Authors

Tina Cheuk http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7841-2492 California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Dr. Jane L. Lehr California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo [biography]

Dr. Jane L. Lehr (she/they) is the Director of the Office of Student Research and Professor in Ethnic Studies and Women’s, Gender & Queer Studies at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is also Director of the CSU STEM Pathways and Research Alliance(CSU-SPARA) in STEM Program at Cal Poly and affiliated faculty in the Center for Engineering, Science & Mathematics Education (CESAME); the department of Computer Science & Software Engineering; and the Science, Technology & Society Program.

Dr. Lehr previously served as elected co-chair of the Science & Technology Taskforce of the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA), and as a Postdoctoral Research Officer at the Centre for Informal Learning and Schools (CILS) at King's College, University of London.

Her graduate training is in Science & Technology Studies and Women's Studies at Virginia Tech and her teaching and research focus primarily on the complex relationships between gender, race, culture, science, technology, and education.
Prof. Dominic J Dal Bello http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8002-3226 Allan Hancock College [biography]

Dom Dal Bello is Professor of Engineering at Allan Hancock College (AHC), a California community college between UC Santa Barbara and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. At AHC, he is Department Chair of Mathematical Sciences, Faculty Advisor of MESA (the Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement Program), has served as Principal/Co-Principal Investigator of several National Science Foundation projects (S-STEM, LSAMP, IUSE). In ASEE, he is chair of the Two-Year College Division, and Vice-Chair/Community Colleges of the Pacific Southwest Section. He received the Outstanding Teaching Award for the ASEE/PSW Section in 2022.
Stephen R. Beard California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo [biography]

Stephen R. Beard is an Assistant Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo in the Computer Science and Software Engineering Department with a joint appointment in the Computer Engineering Department. Stephen's educational goal is to develop opportunities for diverse sets of students to get hands on experience with security, architecture, languages, and compilers. Stephen's research interests primarily revolve around security that involves the hardware-software boundary. This manifests in lots of ways, in particular, cyber-physical security, secure architectures, secure language design, and secure compilation.

As a former transfer student and beneficiary of a great deal of invaluable mentorship throughout his life, Stephen participates in multiple mentoring and advising programs. While many of these are focused on transfer students, he is interested in improving the lived experience of all students. His door is always open if you ever need advice, someone to just listen to you, or just want to chat!

Stephen received his PhD and MS degrees in Computer Science at Princeton University, under the guidance of David I. August as a proud member of the Liberty Research Group. Stephen received his BS degree in Computer Engineering from Cal Poly!
Dr. Fred W Depiero California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo / Allan Hancock College [biography]

Dr. Fred DePiero earned his BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering at Michigan State University. After which he worked at Oak Ridge National Lab in the areas of robotics and machine vision. He then earned his PhD, also in EE, from the University of Tennessee. In 1996 he moved to San Luis Obispo, CA and joined the faculty of Cal Poly in EE. In 2005, Fred received the Distinguished Teaching Award, which is the University’s highest recognition for teaching. Subsequently, he served as an Associate Dean, then rejoined the faculty in the Computer Engineering Department, and retired in 2024. His areas of interest have branched out to include web applications for teaching and learning systems (see YourLearningCoach.org), as well as new approaches design nonlinear voltage transfer characteristics. Fred now teaches part time at Allan Hancock College.
Eva Schiorring STEMEVAL [biography]

Eva Schiorring has almost two decades of experience in research and evaluation and special knowledge about STEM education in community colleges and four-year institutions. She presently serves as the external evaluator for four NSF-funded projects. The
Dr. John Y Oliver http://orcid.org/https://0000-0003-2877-6751 California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo [biography]

Dr. Oliver is a professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. His field of expertise is in computer architecture and system performance analysis, dabbler in cybersecurity and passionate about broadening pathway

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

« View session