Evaluating the Potential of Community College Guided Pathways Reforms to Increase Undergraduate STEM Student Success

With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest in maintaining a well-educated, diverse STEM workforce. To do so, it focuses on understanding how to increase the capacity of community colleges to broaden participation and success in undergraduate STEM programs. Almost two million first-time college students enroll in community colleges each year. Unfortunately, few of these students successfully complete an associate or bachelor's degree in STEM. The structural organization of most community colleges does not provide critical supports that could improve STEM success. For example, they generally lack the structural organization needed to help students consider STEM careers or to align students' coursework and learning experiences with STEM career demands. Consequently, efforts to improve community college student access and success in STEM must address these structural barriers. However, hundreds of community colleges are fundamentally redesigning programs, policies, and practices at scale to better help students choose and complete STEM programs suited to their interests and talents. They are doing this by: (1) creating clear 'program maps' to completion, transfer, and careers in fields such as sciences, engineering, and computer science; (2) helping new students explore career and college options and develop a full-program academic plan; (3) monitoring students' progress to help them stay on their plan; and (4) ensuring that students are building essential skills and knowledge across programs. This project, is designed to evaluate how these whole-college 'guided pathways' reforms are changing practices in STEM programs.

The project team will partner with higher education agencies in three states that are leading statewide community college Guided Pathways reforms: Ohio, Tennessee, and Washington. The goals of the project are to evaluate how these Guided Pathways reforms are changing practices in STEM programs, advising, and other supports; what barriers and facilitators college and STEM program leaders face in implementing these reforms; what metrics colleges should use to formatively evaluate the effects of these reforms on STEM program effectiveness; and what relationship exists between Guided Pathways reforms and enrollment, early progress, and persistence in undergraduate STEM programs by community college students generally and by underrepresented students in particular. The research design is based on a mixed methods approach that will include field research to assess the scale of implementation of Guided Pathways reforms, statistical analysis of student unit records, and qualitative analysis of interview and focus group data. Resulting analyses will be the basis of practitioner-focused reports and briefs and peer-reviewed journal articles. The study is designed to inform college practices and public policy through the identification and validation of metrics. The project team will produce a practitioner guide that includes metrics that for formative use to evaluate the effects of Guided Pathways reforms on STEM outcomes. The team will also produce a practitioner guide on how community colleges can leverage ongoing community college Guided Pathways reforms to improve access to and completion of undergraduate STEM programs. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.

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.