Challenges particular to second-year students have been identified that can impact persistence in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. We implemented a program to improve student success in intermediate-level science courses by helping students to feel they belonged and could succeed in STEM. We used survey measures of perceptions and attitudes and then qualitative measures to characterize the impact of support strategies, including peer mentoring, a second-year science student retreat, learning and advising support resources, and department-specific activities. Analysis of registration and transcript information revealed underperformance by students of color (SOC) and first-generation (FG) students in 200-level science courses. Comparison of these data before and during programming revealed significant improvement in success rates of these students in 200-level biology and chemistry courses, but success rates of SOC and FG students remain lower than the overall rate for 200-level science courses. Contemporaneous with the program, qualitative and quantitative measures of student attitudes revealed a high level of belongingness and support. The results suggest that a focus on students’ metacognition about their own abilities and strategic knowledge of how to succeed may be a fruitful direction for future research.

Vol. 15, No. 3

September 01, 2016

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Downloads: 405

Citations: 10

History

Submitted: 15 January 2016

Revised: 29 April 2016

Accepted: 15 June 2016

Information

© 2016 L. Gregg-Jolly et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2016 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

This program was supported in part by a grant to Grinnell College from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute through the Precollege and Undergraduate Science Education Program. We thank the Grinnell College students who participated in this study and the faculty and staff who contributed to development and implementation of inclusive programming for second-year students. We thank Carlie VanWilligen, director of Institutional Research at Grinnell College, for assistance with survey administration and data acquisition and Susan Ferrari, director of Corporate, Foundation, and Government Relations at Grinnell, for assistance with editing the manuscript.

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