Broadening Participation Research Center: HBCU Center for Math Education and Research

Broadening Participation Research Centers provide support to Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) to conduct broadening participation research and serve as national hubs for the rigorous study and broad dissemination of the critical theories, structures and pedagogies, as well as culturally sensitive interventions that contribute to the success of HBCUs in educating African American STEM undergraduates. This project seeks to increase the number of African American and underrepresented minority students in STEM and math teachers' pipelines by broadening participation research and providing high-impact practices as math tutors for those majoring in STEM and education disciplines. Using the Algebra Project and the Southern Initiative Algebra Project (SIAP) pedagogies, in-service math teachers, pre-service teachers, and STEM college students will implement SIAP's PK-16 Model in several K-12 public school districts in three regions of the United States. Students are provided mentoring as they participate in developmental studies of how students develop and maintain proficiency in math, manage biases associated with minorities in math and science, and persist in STEM disciplines despite those biases. The primary thrust of research will concentrate on the sources and underlying factors governing college students’ success and persistence in STEM and education. Guided by the phenomenological variant of ecological systems and communities of practice theories, which focus on contexts, support, adaptive and maladaptive coping, and the developments of emergent identities undergirding academic performance, the project uses mixed methods (e.g., focus groups, interviews, surveys, type and levels of support, academic records, standardized math scores, attendance records, etc.) to study how African American and underrepresented minority students become proficient math learners, manage biases (including racial, gender, and economic) and persist in STEM disciplines. HBCU college students will be engaged in broadening participation research as field researchers involved in quantitative and qualitative data collection associated with the aforementioned survey research and focus groups. Students will be engaged in both high-impact tutoring practices while being involved in citizen science and action research as they will simultaneously exemplify a form of community engagement representing both their university and the community intervention undergirded by SIAP's design team (i.e., their community and site development team). A robust external evaluation will monitor and assess progress on all objectives, providing both formative and summative assessment of all Center activities. 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.