Expanding STEM Workforce Readiness through Industry Mentors and Advanced Technologies

This project aims to serve the national interest by fully realizing the potential of community college STEM education through industry-aligned undergraduate research experiences. Community colleges serve nearly half of U.S. STEM undergraduates and provide critical pathways into STEM careers and transfer. Connecting classroom learning to authentic research, current technologies, and workplace practices can strengthen student engagement, deepen learning, and better prepare students for the evolving STEM workforce. This Level II Engaged Student Learning project plans to embed industry- informed course-based and mentored undergraduate research into STEM courses and co-curricular activities. Faculty participants plan to work with industry mentors to shape research questions, tools, and learning activities that reflect current workplace practices, including the use of advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) tools and data platforms. The project is intended to help students build technical research skills, digital and data skills, professional workplace skills, ethical awareness, and career readiness. The significance of this work is its focus on broadening access to research-rich, workforce-relevant STEM learning in a two-year college setting while developing a scalable model that can be adapted by other community colleges to support the needs of students and respond to the evolving needs of STEM employers and transfer pathways. The goals of the project are to expand scalable undergraduate research experiences, use faculty–industry partnerships to inform their design, and study how this model affects student learning, workforce readiness, and faculty instructional practice. The scope includes course-based and mentored undergraduate research, online and hybrid research models, research ethics, AI literacy, and faculty–industry partnerships across STEM transfer and technical programs. Project activities plan to include faculty cohorts, summer workshops, communities of practice, mentor matching, curriculum consultation, co-development of student research projects, ethics and AI learning modules, and adaptable faculty-facing toolkits. The project plans to use mixed methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, student artifacts, faculty reflections, and mentor feedback, to investigate changes in student self-efficacy, STEM identity, skill development, and career readiness, as well as the conditions that support implementation across disciplines and formats. Findings and materials are planned for dissemination through conferences, publications, open-access toolkits, and community college STEM networks. 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.