Overview and Objectives
In order for the United States to be competitive in the global market and address the grand challenges the world faces in the future, a strong, diverse STEM workforce is vital. Therefore, efforts are needed to accelerate improvements in the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate education in STEM fields. These efforts will, in turn, impact the retention and graduation rates of undergraduate students pursuing degrees in STEM fields, as well as support diversification of the workforce. UTSA is becoming one of the largest, most diverse public universities in Texas. This success is enriched by the fact that UTSA has embraced its role as a Hispanic Serving Institution. Many UTSA programs provide academic access and opportunity for large numbers of historically underserved students, many of whom are the first in their families to attend a university. In addition, UTSA students bring a wide array of linguistic and cultural repertoires to school, primarily through diverse Spanish-English multilingual and multicultural experiences in prior education and home environments. The challenge for UTSA is to harness the strengths of the multilingual experience and employ these experiences as resources that can lead to innovation and discovery enterprises in STEM. UTSA has begun to focus on the needs of first-generation and/or Hispanic students across the university through two U.S. Department of Education grants such as PIVOT for Academic Success (Title V) and UTSA Educational Training Program: Pipeline Issues funded (IES). . These initiatives demonstrate our priority to all UTSA students. However additional programming is needed to focus specifically on STEM education and student success.
UTSA Colleges of Engineering and Science offers world-class education to ~7,400 undergraduate majors. However, UTSA’s first-year retention rate is 73.6% and the 6-year graduation rate is 36.6%. As a result, capacity building directly connected to instruction and success in STEM courses is needed to improve these retention and graduation rates, and build a diverse, capable workforce.
UTSA University College will lead this project in collaboration with faculty in the College of Engineering, College of Education and Human Development, and the College of Sciences. The mission of University College is to achieve academic excellence in undergraduate education by positively impacting undergraduate student education, encouraging scholar development through exploratory programs, and promoting life-long learning through engaged learning and research. The overall goal for this project is to develop new methods of instruction and associated curricular change that focuses on the intersection of academic literacy and content competencies, through evidence-based teaching approaches, combined with the coaching of STEM faculty, enhanced student mentoring, and professional development experiences to improve student learning and overall success.
The overall goal will be accomplished by successfully completing the following tasks:
- Develop and improve undergraduate STEM students’ integrated understanding of academic literacy and core competencies.
- Create interdisciplinary professional development lesson study groups of instructors that draw explicit attention to the role of academic literacy in the development of strong university-level STEM teaching and learning.
- Align STEM curricula between lower and upper-division courses
- Develop a near-peer mentoring program for sophomore and junior level STEM students.
- Provide research opportunities and professional development activities for STEM students.
- Evaluate the relevance and effectiveness of the institutional curricular redesign.
These tasks align with the priority areas of the building capacity track. Critical Transitions are addressed in Tasks 1 and 3. Innovative Cross-Sector Partners are addressed in Tasks 2, 4, and 5. Research on Broadening the Participation in STEM is addressed in Tasks 1 and 6. It is expected that the proposed multi-faceted approach will yield the following anticipated outcomes: increase the retention, graduation, and persistence rates of the students; improve the students’ self-efficacy; provide faculty with opportunities to develop innovative, evidence-based best practice teaching approaches that enhance student learning; and provide students with marketable skills to be successful in the professional world.
Background
The Texas Workforce Commission projects that, over the next decade, Texas will require 60,000 new engineers and scientists (Texas Workforce Commission, 2015). To meet the need of an additional 6,000 degreed individuals per year, Texas must nearly double its annual graduation of scientists and engineers (University of Texas System, 2013). UTSA currently awards 1,045 bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields each year with 52.6% awarded to scholars identified as African American, American Indian, Alaskan Native, or Hispanic ethnicity. However, overall STEM major retention and graduation rates remain a significant obstacle at UTSA. Most students who leave the Colleges of Engineering and Science (COE&COS) will do so in their first two years of study. Nearly half of incoming freshmen (41.3% COE, 51.5% COS) will leave these programs in their first year. Forty-seven percent of Hispanic students enrolled in these colleges as freshmen will not enroll as sophomores. An additional 18.4% of COE and 17.7% of COS students will not see the end of their sophomore year, and only 43.4% of engineering and 31.8% of science transfers from UTSA’s neighboring Alamo Community College Districts (ACCD) will graduate with their STEM degree. Low student retention in science and engineering is not a problem unique to UTSA. According to the National Center for Higher Education (NCPR), only 55.5% of students nationally who pursue a STEM degree will graduate with a STEM degree. A significant concern with STEM majors at UTSA is the passing rates for gateway courses including Physics (63%), Calculus (61%), Chemistry (52%), and Engineering Analysis (51%). These passing rates also show significant differences based on ethnicity as shown in Table 1. Although not to the same degree, challenges in passing rates are observed once students reach the sophomore to junior transition in key success courses such as physics 3203: classical mechanics (25.3%), mechanical engineering 3113: measurements and instrumentation (11.6%), and biomedical engineering 3303: bio instrumentation (6.6%).
The National Center for Postsecondary Research (NCPR) report “Bridging the Gap: An Impact Study of Eight Developmental Summer Bridge Programs in Texas” (Barnett, E.A., Bork, R.H., Mayer, A.K., Pretlow, J., Wathington, H.D., Weiss, M.J., 2012: New York) identified that high school summer programs, similar to programs already in place at UTSA, are effective in increasing students’ college math and writing preparedness and improving students’ passing rates in their first college-level math and writing courses. However, the NCPR report also found that the effect was short-lived: after the first semester, bridge program students had the same rate of persistence as their non-bridge program peers. This finding reflects the efficacy of programs at UTSA where reliance on bridging and first-year programs do not translate into sustained persistence within a STEM major or result in improved graduation rates. Therefore, the proposed project will fill that gap by creating a program that engages the STEM faculty to sustain student persistence from lower to upper-level courses through the Language, Literacy, and STEM (LA-STEM) Framework.