Description
Increasing Community College STEM Opportunities is a project aiming to remediate racial, gender and class tracking in community college math pathways in order to advance opportunity and equity in STEM participation.
About
As community colleges around the country move toward eliminating developmental education, students are increasingly eligible to take a college-level Statistics/Liberal Arts Math (SLAM) OR Business and Science Technology, Engineering and Math (BSTEM) courses. This project will investigate the extent to which students are tracked into SLAM and BSTEM pathways along racial/ethnic, gender, first generation status and family income lines, as well as determine successful methods to encourage students enrolled in SLAM courses to enroll in BSTEM math courses in subsequent semesters.
“Increasing Community Colleges STEM Opportunities” is a partnership with the Los Angeles Community College District and LACCD’s Pierce College.
With this project, researchers hope to learn more about whether offering SLAM courses as a course default may inadvertently track racially-minoritized students and women out of STEM fields. In addition, we’ll review casual evidence on the potential effectiveness of nudging students to explore their STEM interests, and develop a model for a statistics-to-STEM bridge experience that community college math departments can adopt.
Project News
Tatiana Melguizo and Pullias Center to Study Community College STEM Opportunities with NSF Grant
Project Team
Tatiana Melguizo
Principal Investigator
Edouard A. Tchertchian
LACCD/Pierce College
Federick Ngo
Co-Principal Investigator
Univ. of Nevada, Las Vegas
Cheryl D. Ching
Co-Principal Investigator
Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston
Partners
Funder
National Science Foundation‘s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country. NSF Grant DUE-2215700.
