Beyond STEM Transfer: A Longitudinal Mixed Methods Investigation of Factors Shaping Postsecondary STEM Trajectories and Outcomes of Students Beginning at Community Colleges

This project aims to serve the national interest by improving postsecondary STEM teaching, learning, and institutional environments to support the persistence and success of students beginning their STEM education and careers at community colleges. These institutions play an important role in broadening the nation's STEM talent by offering a range of educational options for diverse student populations, including transfer into a four-year STEM major and pathways to STEM careers such as certificates, diplomas, associate degrees, and industry training credentials, all of which contribute to the STEM and STEM-related workforce. However, there is limited understanding of the full range of factors and contexts that influence various community college STEM pathways from a longitudinal standpoint. To advance knowledge that highlights the collective significance of teaching, learning, and institutional environments, this Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Engaged Student Learning (ESL) Level 3 project plans to adopt an expansive time window to capture students' STEM pathways and outcomes through the community college. Using 12 years' worth of survey and interview data, the project team hopes to unpack a comprehensive set of experiences and outcomes in undergraduate STEM education, as well as the factors that influence them. The findings from this project will be used to further refine and develop a new Community College STEM Educational Pathways and Success model. Overall, this project holds the potential to produce new research-based knowledge and tools to transform teaching, learning, and STEM education through community colleges. To advance theoretical and empirical understanding of the myriad STEM pathways through community colleges, the project intends to explore how beginning community college students experience undergraduate STEM teaching, learning environments, and various contextual factors to illuminate the components and conditions that result in improved STEM teaching and learning spanning community colleges and four-year institutions that serve STEM transfer students. Using a longitudinal mixed methods design and a robust panel cohort of about 1,660 community college students beginning in STEM in Fall 2014, the project plans to continue following this cohort for four additional years to examine how this cohort's undergraduate STEM education impacted their long-term STEM outcomes in the academic, professional, and workforce domains. Data collection begins with one final wave of a 12-year panel survey, followed by two waves of qualitative interviews to dig deeper into these students' perspectives and experiences throughout their undergraduate STEM education journey. To ensure actionable and translatable knowledge to inform research and innovations nationally, the project will disseminate a new theoretical model, survey instrument, and interview protocols that researchers and practitioners can adopt or adapt in their study and practice of similar issues. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools. 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.