Cultivating First-Generation Students' STEM Creativity through Mentorship and Problem-Solving Training

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Level 1 implementation and evaluation project aims to test two ways of helping first-generation undergraduates at a Hispanic-Serving Institution build creative problem-solving skills and a stronger sense of belonging in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Many first-generation students reach college with little prior exposure to hands-on innovation or role models in STEM careers, so they can struggle to picture themselves as scientists or engineers and to persist when coursework becomes difficult. The project will compare a semester-long faculty-mentoring pathway with a creativity-skills curriculum that teaches proven techniques for generating original solutions to real STEM challenges. By learning which pathway best boosts students’ confidence, perseverance, and inventive thinking, the work will guide colleges in designing programs that expand the nation’s STEM talent pool and open rewarding careers to students who are the first in their families to attend college. The research team will recruit sixty undergraduate participants from an existing campus support program and randomly assign approximately equal numbers of first-generation and continuing- generation students to one of three groups: a social mentoring condition, a cognitive creativity- training condition, or a control group. Each intervention will span fifteen weeks, with matched seminar time, structured homework, and modest stipends. Outcomes—including self-efficacy, outcome expectations, creative performance on a judged research-proposal video, and pre-career behaviors such as STEM interests, goals, and actions—will be measured before and after the intervention with validated surveys, rubric-based ratings, and academic records. Guided by social cognitive career theory, the study will test hypotheses about how mentoring and creativity instruction influence motivational mechanisms and will examine whether effects differ by student first-generation status. Findings will be disseminated through peer-reviewed publications, conference presentations, and free online access to all training materials and evaluation tools, enabling other campuses to replicate successful practices. 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.