Creating Holistic Advising and Mentoring to Advance Student Success in Physical Sciences

This project will contribute to the national need for well-educated scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and technicians by supporting the retention and graduation of high-achieving, low-income students with demonstrated financial need at the University of Central Florida. Over its six-year duration, this Track 2 project will fund scholarships to 40 unique students who are pursuing bachelor's degrees in chemistry, forensic science, physics, and photonics. First year students will receive up to five years of support and transfer students will receive up to three years. This project aims to provide scholarships and holistic support to promote social mobility and contribute to the need for economic competitiveness and national security of the United States. Using a holistic approach, the Creating Holistic Advising and Mentoring to Advance Student Success in Physical Sciences project scholars will be mentored to leverage a personalized combination of existing programs and new interventions at the crossroads of advising, academics, and sense of belonging development. This reflexive and individualized approach to mentoring and advising will support students in successfully navigating their degree program to on-time graduation. The reflexive and holistic model will contribute to efforts to improve retention and graduation rates of all types of students as it provides a framework for addressing individual needs. The overall goal of this project is to increase STEM degree completion of academically talented, low-income undergraduates with demonstrated financial need. There are four specific objectives: (1) recruit and provide scholarships to 40 domestic, low-income, academically talented students in chemistry, forensic science, physics, and photonics; (2) retain scholars in the target majors (at least 85% retained to second year) and ensure on-time graduation (at least 50% graduate in 4 years); (3) match scholars to job opportunities or graduate programs; and (4) utilize formative feedback from scholars to iteratively improve programming and disseminate successful interventions. Many programs intended to support undergraduate STEM students focus on changing the student to succeed in the existing STEM system or provide enhanced student support in one area (i.e. advising and mentoring) without emphasis on other academic or social/emotional aspects of individual students. While institutions have established supports to increase student success, barriers to retention and on-time graduation remain. The project is a holistic approach that considers the needs of individual scholars by enhancing support holistically in advising, academics, as well as sense of belonging. This project will study the effectiveness of holistic advising and mentoring on low-income student success in terms of retention and 4-year graduation rates in the target majors. It will also explore how successful students (i.e. retained and graduated on time) value academic, cohort-building, and advising/mentoring support. This project will be evaluated using a mixed methods approach using institutional data as well as scholar feedback and reflections in surveys and interviews. Results of the project will be disseminated via conference presentations, journal articles, and workshops at national conferences as well as on the project website. This project is funded by NSF's Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, which seeks to increase the number of academically talented low-income students with demonstrated financial need who earn degrees in STEM fields. It also aims to improve the education of future STEM workers, and to generate knowledge about academic success, retention, transfer, graduation, and academic/career pathways of low-income students. 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.