Increasing Community College STEM Opportunities

Increasing Community College STEM Opportunities | Background & Goals | Funder | Research Team

Increasing Community College STEM Opportunities is a project aiming to remediate racial, gender and class tracking in community college math pathways in order to advance opportunity and equity in STEM participation.

Background & Goals

As community colleges around the country move toward eliminating developmental education, students are increasingly eligible to take a college-level Statistics/Liberal Arts Math (SLAM) OR Business and Science Technology, Engineering and Math (BSTEM) courses. This project will investigate the extent to which students are tracked into SLAM and BSTEM pathways along racial/ethnic, gender, first generation status and family income lines, as well as determine successful methods to encourage students enrolled in SLAM courses to enroll in BSTEM math courses in subsequent semesters.

“Increasing Community Colleges STEM Opportunities” is a partnership with the Los Angeles Community College District and LACCD’s Pierce College.

With funding from the National Science Foundation and partnerships with University of Nevada, Las Vegas and University of Massachusetts-Boston, researchers hope to learn more about whether offering SLAM courses as a course default may inadvertently track racially-minoritized students and women out of STEM fields, as well as casual evidence on the potential effectiveness of nudging students to explore their STEM interests, and develop a model for a statistics-to-STEM bridge experience that community college math departments can adopt.

Funder

National Science Foundation‘s mission is to advance the progress of science, a mission accomplished by funding proposals for research and education made by scientists, engineers, and educators from across the country. NSF Grant DUE-2215700.

Research Team

Edouard A. Tchertchian
LACCD/Pierce College