Broadening Access to STEM and Geoscience through Support for the Whole Student

Editor's Notes

• #2: Need 10-13 slides (13 minutes + 2 minutes questions)
• #3: Here you can see some basic enrollment statistics from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Education Statistics. Note that NSF considers “geoscience” to include atmospheric sciences, Earth sciences, and ocean sciences. It is unclear where environmental science falls in their classification, but it may be included under Biology. On the surface, these numbers look encouraging. Over the decade between 2001 and 2011, the total college enrollment went up from roughly 10 million to roughly 13 million; an increase of about 30%. All of these categories of BS degrees grew by a larger percentage than enrollment. And the minority share of Geoscience BS degrees went up by over 6%. But the total minority enrollment in colleges went up by almost 10%. So we’re growing but still falling behind in graduating minority students. Another interesting feature of the data from this decade is that the percentage of women entering geoscience has dropped by almost 4 percent. It is unclear if this due to a flood of new male graduates or women moving to other disciplines or some combination of both.
• #4: But race/ethnicity is only one measure of diversity. There are many ways students can be “diverse” in our programs. Diversity of culture, diversity of race or ethinicity, diversity of experience, gender, sexual orientation… If we want to change the perception of STEM in general, and geoscience specifically, as the province of old white guys, we have bring in voices from all segments of society and all walks of life.
• #5: The reasons why any student doesn’t enter and succeed in STEM are various and can include things like underpreparation in science and math, family pressures or expectations, or the lack of a recognizable role model in their discipline. Many of these factors are complex and interrelated. It isn’t feasible to create programs that address each issue separately or support each student population individually. But initiatives with a holistic approach have shown success in supporting all students through to graduation, particularly those with significant obstacles. These programs support the Whole Student, going beyond just what happens in the classroom.
• #6: The ECC model was formulated by Jolly and others in 2004 and has three critical components. - Engagement - Capacity - Continuity Each of the three components are necessary but not sufficient to ensure that students persist in STEM disciplines. It’s the combination of the three that creates the right conditions for their success.
• #7: “Engagement” is the awareness of, and interest in, STEM fields as well as the self-motivation to succeed in them. Supporting Engagement includes issues such as: Geoscience Careers – Many students, especially those at two-year colleges, are looking for a good-paying, high-status job that will enable them to support their families. Geosciece and STEM have many such opportunities that we can share with them as a way to keep them engaged. Societal Issues – Many of today’s students are motivated to solve big problems facing humanity. Geoscience knowledge is central to many of these issues. Sense of Community – Building a sense of community in your department or program can help students feel like they belong in science. Undergraduate Research – Research experiences are a great way for students to learn the culture of science and develop valuable (and marketable) skills.
• #8: “Capacity” refers to skills and knowledge needed to successfully advance to more rigorous levels of study. The geosciences abound in real-world, interdisciplinary problems that help students learn how to think like a scientist. Academic support systems are also crucial, from tutoring centers, to faculty familiarity with issues facing English language learners, or strategies for countering stereotype threat and solo status. All of these efforts increase students’ capacity for success.
• #9: “Continuity” refers to institutional/programmatic systems that support student advancement in STEM disciplines. For example, good advising is essential if students are to know about, much less use, the academic support systems that exist on your campus. And Mentoring programs, whether form or informal, greatly strengthen the growth of students as professionals in the sciences. And Strong support for transfer students provides bridges between institutions which can offer the best chance for a successful transition between schools.
• #10: Switching gears a bit, what does Supporting the Whole Student look like at larger scales? In thinking about working at the programmatic level, it’s helpful to recast things some. From this new perspective, Student Engagement can be thought of as Attracting New Students to the program. Supports that help students successfully complete degrees are analogous to ensuring continuity. And making sure that students are prepared to be productive members of the workforce is a capacity-building activity. The literature has suggestions for the kinds of departmental practices that contribute to these different components. But we were interested in knowing more about what kinds of activities were going on in institutions currently.
• #11: The first piece of this effort was to know the lay of the land. Given that one of the objectives of InTeGrate is to broaden access to learning about the Earth to students from traditionally underrepresented groups, it made sense to start by understanding how students learn about the Earth at Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs). So in the summer of 2013, I downloaded the federal listings of Historically Black College and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and Tribal Colleges – those being three well-defined, easily accessible sets of MSIs. After that, I applied some brute force to the problem – I went to the website for every institution on those lists. Just over 500 in total at the time. I was looking for degree programs with a significant geoscience content. Not just traditional geo degrees in traditional geo departments, I wanted to find programs that were what I thought of as “geo-like” – environmental science, soil science, meteorology, sustainability, oil and gas engineering, etc. All those things require Earth science knowledge, but may not be located in Geology departments. What we found was 150 different institutions with at least one “geo-like” degree program. Which was surprising given that the common wisdom is that since these schools often don’t have geoscience departments they probably don’t have geoscience degrees.
• #12: Digging into the degrees more, we found that there are indeed geoscience degrees. And Environmental science degrees and lots of others as well that require significant knowledge about the Earth. Here you can see the distribution of degree titles and levels that we found. Geo and Enviro dominate the picture, but they aren’t the only game in town.
• #13: So what is the source of the surprise or disconnect? We looked at where these degrees are located and found that there are a number of traditional geoscience departments in these schools (predominantly in HSIs as it turns out). But there are more “geo-like” degrees being offered in non-geo or interdisciplinary departments which might be completely invisible if we are expecting the name of the academic unit to be a good proxy for whether or not there is a geo-like degree present at an institution
• #14: To better understand the nature of these programs, InTeGrate conducted interviews with schools in each group, focusing on their strategies for attracting, supporting, and preparing minority students for careers in the geosciences. These interviews were used to create profiles of the institutions for the InTeGrate website. In addition, participants at a 2014 InTeGrate Broadening Access to the Earth and Environmental Sciences workshop also completed program profiles for their institutions. Which gave us a final collection of 34 profiles encompassing 16 from MSIs and 17 from Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs).
• #15: We used a qualitative analysis approach that involves a constant comparison method to identify emergent themes and here you can see some of the results.
• #16: All of these resources and many others can be found on the project websites listed here. Thanks to NSF for funding these efforts and thanks to my colleagues in both projects for their continued amazing work.