SUPPORTING UNDERREPRESENTED UNDERGRADUATE STUDENTS IN THE GEOSCIENCES THROUGH PARTNERSHIPS BETWEEN UNIVERSITY HOUSING AND ACADEMICS

The overarching goal of the GeoScholar Program at the University of South Carolina (UofSC) is to increase the number of academically talented low-income, minority, and first-generation college students that pursue and complete undergraduate geoscience degrees within the School of the Earth, Ocean, and Environment (SEOE). In addition to tuition support, students receive a supplement to live at the Green Quad (GQ) Living and Learning Community that promotes sustainable activities across campus and has an onsite Faculty Principal and mentoring team. The project evaluation aimed to understand Geoscholar changes in perceptions through their time in the program as well as measure differences between Geoscholar perceptions and students that were not in the program but enrolled at UofSC, including SEOE majors and non-majors. A combined Likert-scale and open-ended pre-post survey were developed and on-site interviews were conducted. Preliminary results show GeoScholars have a similar, neutral sense of belonging to non-majors of similar backgrounds. This suggests that GeoScholars, although committed to majoring in the geosciences, do not particularly feel like they belong . GeoScholar self-efficacy, however, is significantly higher than non-majors of similar backgrounds and is maintained throughout their time at UofSC. In other words, while GeoScholars may not feel like they necessarily belong in the geosciences, they do feel like they will be successful. An important finding is that while none of the non-majors changed majors into the geosciences after taking an introductory geoscience course, their self-efficacy in the geosciences increased from 3.1 to 4.3 (out of 1 -5 scale). The dramatic increase shows that having one geoscience class can make a difference in attitudes, if not career choice. Our results also showed that all students who lived in the GQ had more positive views about their housing experience, greater academic progress regardless of their major, and were often more involved in the campus community than those not living in GQ. We argue that embedding underrepresented students in targeted living and learning communities and increasing opportunities for them to enroll in environmentally related courses provides an additional mechanism of expanding diversity within the geoscience community.