RESEARCH ON S&E EDUCATION AT MSIS: WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?

The Historically Black Colleges and Universities Undergraduate Program (HBCU-UP) provides awards to enhance the quality of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and research at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as a means to broaden participation in the Nation's STEM workforce.

Minority Serving Institutions (MSI) play a significant role in the education and development of underrepresented minority (URM) students in the natural and physical sciences, including geosciences. However a challenge lies in the absence of systematic knowledge on how and why these institutions have been able to sustain their success for decades. Education Research projects in NSF’s HBCU-UP focus on evidence-based research studies that contribute to advancing our understanding of how to broaden the participation and propel/sustain success for underrepresented groups in the STEM enterprise. That PI community poses as an excellent resource to allow us to learn important questions to pursue, innovative research designs, mixed research methodologies, and implementation challenges.

There is also external evaluation of the program portfolio. There is process evaluation to describe the characteristics of recognizable models among HBCU-UP projects and identify strategies that may have accelerated or inhibited attainment of project goals, and there is summative evaluation focuses on the extent to which HBCU-UP has produced outcomes that meet its stated goals for students, faculty, and the institutional infrastructure of the HBCUs themselves.

In this session we will share project goals, and discuss best practices, challenges, and preliminary findings, as well as consider how the outcomes might guide future directions in similar programs.