Opening New Doors to Accelerating Success: Evaluating a Postsecondary STEM Persistence Student Support Program

• In Event: 51.040 - Promoting STEM Success and Persistence for Traditionally Disadvantaged Students: Evaluating Higher Education Student Success Programs

Abstract

The University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) recently received HSI designation, but it does not necessarily resemble the other HSIs of recent years. UCSB faces a number of unique and pressing issues regarding its Hispanic and other underserved students. Primarily, this population of underserved students includes large numbers of low-income, first-generation, and URM. In an attempt to address these issues, UCSB was awarded a Title V grant to fund a new initiative entitle “Opening New Doors to Accelerating Success” (ONDAS). The ultimate goal of ONDAS is to lay the groundwork for improving UCSB’s approach to serving Hispanic and low-income students in STEM areas. There are three key programmatic activities associated with the ONDAS program:

(a) ONDAS student support center - The center offers a location for students to meet with professors informally as well as during selected professor office hours, collaborate with peer mentors, and participate in campus learning assistance services (i.e., seminars on time management, making a study plan, confidence, etc.).
(b) Faculty professional development - Professional development activities were provided for professors involved in teaching within one of the targeted courses. Targeted courses were identified as those in which achievement gaps between underrepresented minority students and their more advantaged peers were observed to be the largest. Seminars and workshops for professional development focus on concepts related to learning, teaching, and diversity.
(c) The use of learning analytics – Learning analytics are employed as part of the program to help identify students who will benefit most from ONDAS programming.

Prior to the 2017-18 school year, an identified group of students identified as high risk of being placed on probation using learning analytics received an email and a hard copy letter introducing them to the ONDAS center and inviting them to utilize the available ONDAS services. We were interested in exploring the effectiveness of the ONDAS center as it may have been influenced by receiving an invitation to utilize the services. Using a fuzzy regression discontinuity technique – the institution identified cutoff for high risk was at 15% and the instrument was invitation – we examined the following outcomes: course grade, odds of academic probation, and course series persistence (e.g., completing Chem 1 and then enrolling in Chem 2 the following quarter).

While administrative data from the full school year (fall, winter, and spring quarters) will not be available until early August, preliminary data using the first two quarters presented some interesting findings. With a concerted effort to promote persistence and success in STEM fields and college in general, our results show that: (a) students who utilized the ONDAS center services experienced benefits across a variety of outcomes and (b) the more often they visited the center, the more pronounced these results were. The key outcomes in which we observed benefits were: course grade, and reduced odds of academic probation. We are unable yet to determine whether course series persistence was impacted. An analysis using full academic year data will be completed during the fall.

Authors

• Jay Plasman, The Ohio State University

• Michael A. Gottfried, University of California - Santa Barbara

• Barbara Walker