UC Merced STEM Summer Start

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2 project aims to increase success and retention of first-year undergraduate STEM majors by offering a suite of high-quality, pre-matriculation summer educational experiences that are accessible to every student and meet the full range of incoming student academic preparation needs. Many universities have well-established, intensive Summer Bridge programs. However, these programs are often high cost to run and reach a limited range of students. This project will explore a broad range of program formats, including in-person and online; short-duration and long-duration; community-based and independent; and review-oriented and acceleration-oriented. For all of these programs, we will be particularly focused on connecting the summer with the first semester college experience. We anticipate that the findings from our studies will be informative to other institutions looking to identify successful, scalable models for pre-matriculation summer programming and strengthening connections between summer and first-year academic experiences. University of California, Merced proposes the implementation of a comprehensive STEM early-start summer program for pre-matriculated incoming students. This program is designed to help historically underrepresented students make a successful academic and social transition to their STEM major and to improve the shares of students who are underrepresented minorities, first-generation and Pell-eligible STEM students who persist in their STEM major. In particular, the STEM Summer Start Program would be focused on three goals:1. Provide a suite of high-quality pre-matriculation summer educational experiences that are accessible to every student and meet the full range of incoming student academic preparation needs; 2. Create a cohesive, connected experience between the Summer Start programs and the Fall semester entry-level STEM courses that supports student development of sense of belonging, self-efficacy and resilience, in addition to academic content and study skills and;3. Study the impacts of various pedagogical devices and early-start programmatic activities on student success, including academic success in entry-level STEM courses, retention in STEM majors, time-to-degree and selected psycho-social metrics. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.