Scaling and Sustaining Effective Practices to Drive Institutional Transformation

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Institutional Transformation project will scale and sustain a number of student and faculty programs at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Early undergraduate STEM courses can be challenging for both students and educators, and as such can become a barrier to students looking to pursue a degree in STEM. Universities often offer academic support for students and professional development centered on teaching for faculty. However, it can be challenging to build awareness of these opportunities, encourage participation, and grow and sustain promising efforts. This project will scale successful pilot programs for UNM students and faculty across STEM programs and build bridges from the classroom to support resources. Faculty will be introduced to tools and interventions that will allow them to creatively support student engagement and success. The project will benefit all students in the impacted classes and programs, with a particular focus on improving STEM degree completion for lower income students. This project integrates multiple evidence-based interventions into an institutional strategy to improve STEM degree persistence and completion for all UNM students. The project will design degree pathways that engage students and include curricular safety nets to improve completion rates. Curricular transformation will enable immediate access to problem-solving in a student's area of STEM interest and reduce math pre-requisite barriers. Faculty professional development will encourage evidence-based practices and allow educators to bring university resources, such as peer tutoring and wellness programming, directly to their classes. In addition to scaling and institutionalizing effective practices, the project will research how an improved student experience and contributes to an improved faculty experience. Results will be disseminated through conference presentations, annual reports, and scholarly publications. This project is funded by the HSI Program, which aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and increase capacity to engage in the development and implementation of innovations to improve STEM teaching and learning at HSIs. 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.