RCN-UBE: Equity and Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM)

To promote the progress of science, it is necessary to ensure that barriers to full participation by women, first-generation college students, and racial and ethnic minorities in STEM are identified and removed. Equity and Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM) is a Research Coordination Network that will include higher-education faculty, initially in the natural sciences, from a growing network of institutions across the United States. Through regular online discussions, a monthly newsletter, small workshops, and larger, annual meetings, EDU-STEM will begin by coordinating the efforts of participants to construct a data-management platform to better understand barriers to equity in STEM across regional and institution types. Possible barriers include, but are not limited to, large class sizes, reduced sense of inclusion, stereotype threat, a lack of role models, and test anxiety that disadvantages underrepresented groups. Working from these baseline data, EDU-STEM faculty will develop collaborative classroom-level experiments designed to reduce these barriers to success in STEM. EDU-STEM will impact society broadly by: (1) identifying barriers to inclusion in STEM; (2) implementing and testing educational interventions designed to increase participation, and (3) increasing the number of faculty engaged in reflective research on inclusion in STEM.

Gaps - between males and females, and between ethnic and racial groups - are well established as challenges for STEM educators, yet less is known about the barriers to full participation in STEM or targeted strategies that instructors can overcome, in order to promote learning for all students. Equity and Diversity in Undergraduate STEM (EDU-STEM) is a research coordination network that will integrate research and teaching in evidence-based classroom experiences, across life sciences curricula, using a multi-pronged approach. Specifically, the network will (a) coordinate efforts to identify metrics to be used across the network; (b) collect data on science courses at participating institutions (including research universities, community colleges, and minority-serving institutions); (c) construct a shared data-management tool to promote regional and institutional comparisons; (d) test and assess, in collaboration with an educational psychologist and small cohort of network partners, in situ interventions to minimize documented barriers; and (e) disseminate network findings via presentations at disciplinary meetings, publications, and the EDU-STEM website and newsletter. Also, EDU-STEM will involve institutional teams in a testable leadership model to promote cultural shifts in how science faculty - at both the departmental and institutional levels - approach evidence-based teaching.

This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.