Urban STEM Collaboratory After Two Years: A Multi-institutional Approach to the Success of Financially Disadvantaged Students

Abstract

The Urban STEM Collaboratory is a five-year project sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that addresses challenges to student success in STEM disciplines through a multi-institutional collaboration via the University of Memphis (UofM), University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), and Indiana University--Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). Study groups, tutoring, peer and faculty mentoring, and career exploration programs are being used across the three campuses to increase the participants’ commitment to a STEM field. Innovative features from CourseNetworking (CN) software are being deployed to provide scholars with evidence of their learning journey while expanding a meaningful academic cloud-based social network. This paper extends a previous introductory ASEE conference paper titled: “Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory,” (Author, et al., 2020), which outlined the initial efforts of the tri-campus collaboration. The purpose of the present paper is to summarize the impact of the project, including data analysis of effectiveness, for Year 1: 2019-2020 and Year 2: 2020-2021. Although still in progress, with the longitudinal efficacy of several of the project’s components undetermined, the project’s organizational structure, activities, and findings to date should be of value to others conducting or proposing projects with similar goals.