Examining Gaps in Supporting Underserved Community College Students

Within CCRI’s research, we recognize the unique challenges faced by students from marginalized backgrounds, particularly those belonging to communities of color, who form a significant portion of our community college demographic. Our exploration of data and historical trends reveals that due to a persistent lack of clarity in transfer pathways in STEM majors, these students may not be prepared to apply for their preferred university or major.

Given the ever-expanding nature of STEM disciplines and the increasing competitiveness among students, it is imperative that we develop a strategic plan of action. Our focus is on establishing and enhancing partnerships specifically tailored to address the needs of disproportionately marginalized students. Throughout our research, we emphasize resource equity and access to fortify our support framework for these students. As we diversify the conversations of how to approach providing these resources and support systems, we encourage you to read our findings which may be accessed here.

STEM Transfer Partnership’s Convening 4

We are excited to share the great work being accomplished with this community of practice which is dedicated to improving transfer for STEM students from low-income backgrounds. The STEM Transfer Partnerships program convened for the 4th time last week and we experienced new connections being made for STEM pathways among 2- and 4-year institutions in WA state, sharing ideas on ways to continue growing and sustaining these partnerships, and new team members! We’ll be writing about what we’ve learned from this convening and look forward to sharing it with you. We invite you to read our previous 3 data notes on structuring STEM transfer partnerships, complex networks of community and learning from students.

NTSW: STEM Transfer Partnership Engineering Pathway Access Increase

ChemE Capstone project

Team members Matthew Ford, Aleya Dhanji, Kira Glynn King, Jie Sheng, Skyler Roth, and Emese Hadnagy have been looking into increasing and consistently expanding outreach to minority serving 2-year and 4-year institutions to promote engineering pathways for increasing students’ upward mobility. Through countless trials and tribulations, this incredible group of individuals focused on identifying shared data needs around student success barriers, established inter-institutional data sharing protocols, and developed a framework to significantly increase, diversify, and enhanced existing outreach, recruitment and academic advising practices in support of these students.

Such work is extensively crucial in promoting equity-based educational protocols for transfer students moving through STEM pathways. Many of these students face disproportionate experiences of adversity and barriers to their success as minority students, let alone being transfer students. As such, the team’s development and utilization of a new, holistic data model for transfer pathways has been extensively successful in expanding Moser’s Transfer Student Capital model, leading to potential expansive increases in student accessibility of support during their transfer STEM experiences and prospective, successful outcomes. Such work lends a promising outlook for the future of transfer partnerships along the road, hosting great impact for student support and STEM engagement.

You can find the full journal article HERE

Listening to Students: New Data Note on Getting Student Input

As STP teams have been working on action plans to expand STEM equity at their institutions, CCRI has documented the process of their efforts through a variety of data collection efforts, including participant observation in coaching sessions and convenings, surveys, and interviews. Analysis of this data reveals the challenges and creative innovations embedded in the process of developing a plan for student input and turning that input into student-centered programs and process improvements. The most recent data note shares findings about the iterative process of developing these plans, as teams use both formal and informal learning from students to inform and refine subsequent efforts. We find that teams are thinking creatively not only about how to get student input but also what defines input and how to interpret and apply what they learn from students.

A common experience for STP teams in the initial period of the program was grappling with how to define student input. Many of the STP participants have years, if not decades, of experience working with students in the STEM pathway, but does that experiential knowledge constitute data? Similarly, many participants were learning from students informally at events and in classroom settings but wondered how to synthesize and interpret those informal interactions. One of the key lessons of the first half of the program was that experiential knowledge and informal feedback from students matter a great deal in the action research process. Teams tuned into this information and used it as the basis for initial student engagement events as well as to inform more systematic data collection efforts for student input.

Teams are also thinking outside the box about collecting student input, often combining student engagement with gathering input. Teams hosted hands-on events like building rockets and soldering hearts while also cultivating feedback through conversation, focus groups, and/or exit surveys. Most importantly, teams are not relying exclusively on one stream of student feedback or input but, rather, combining multiple methodologies, both formal and informal, to develop a robust understanding of the student experience and to inform improvements in STEM education and transfer.

Overall, what we learned in this analysis is that STP teams are thinking creatively to develop new strategies for student input, focusing on student engagement in combination with data collection efforts. Each step of the process informs the next, working holistically with both formal and informal information sources. Ultimately, this approach results in interventions and process improvements that are sensitive to the students in a particular context, providing students with the resources and supports they need.

Talking about Transforming Transfer with the Chronicle of Higher Education

In August, Dr. Lia Wetzstein, the director of CCRI, participated in a panel discussion hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education. The focus of discussion was the need to improve the transfer process to achieve more equitable outcomes in higher education. Lia had the opportunity to highlight CCRI’s STEM Transfer Partnerships, composed of nine teams from two-year and four-year institutions in Washington. These teams have been actively engaging with their students to gather valuable input. This feedback has influenced their initiatives, leading to innovative approaches to enhance the transfer student experience, particularly those from low-income backgrounds.

You can read more about the panel discussion here.

Transformative partnership praxis for equitable STEM transfer

As the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) program approaches the one-year mark, we are able to reflect on the strategies for success that our two-year and four-year institutional partners have developed in their work to advance their partnerships and increase STEM transfer success for low income students. In our second data note on the STP program, we describe the ways STP partnership teams are dismantling barriers through networks of transformative partnership praxis, building multi-layered and flexibly structured communities.

Over the course of 12 months, CCRI has supported the progress of STP teams and their plans of action aimed at improving STEM transfer for students at their institutions. Teams have engaged in two full-community gatherings as well as monthly coaching sessions. Throughout, CCRI has collected data on their experiences through participant observation, survey, and document analysis. Examining this data, we find that teams often experience similar barriers in their efforts to implement systemic change in STEM transfer processes, most notably low-income student recruitment and long term program sustainability. In our recent data note, we look at how partnering institutions respond to these challenges. We find that taking steps toward institutional transformation requires participants to build flexible and multi-layered communities, networks that draw upon resources and expertise from beyond the team membership.

At this intermediate stage of the program, many STP teams are working on the big problems that make the work of expanding STEM access and supporting transfer students so challenging. One central challenge is the question of how to recruit students from low-income backgrounds to STEM fields and how best to support them through transfer and degree completion. What are the best ways to reach out to these students in the early years of their college education? How can support programs engage these students as they juggle the competing priorities of school, family, and work schedules? In tackling these questions, teams are often prompted to expand the boundaries of their networks of praxis, connecting with programs such as TRIO and MESA that have a well-established set of strategies for engaging and supporting low-income students. Rather than trying to ‘reinvent the wheel’ as several participants phrased it, teams are joining forces with partners across their institutions in collaborations that benefit low-income students in many ways. Teams are also extending their networks to engage institutional leaders, finding ways to engage college and university administrators in ways that broaden the impact of their work.

STP teams are not limiting their outreach to their respective institutions but, rather, reaching beyond the college and university of their partnership to include not only other institutions but also policymakers, students and families, and professional networks. The STP program is designed to embed the work of partnerships within a community of practice, invested professionals committed to interventions to improve STEM transfer. The purpose of the biannual convenings is to foster cross-community collaboration and learning. The most recent data note describes how these kinds of connections are helping teams identify resources and solve complex problems. As they look to the future to map out a plan for long term sustainability, they draw upon ideas from other teams, using those ideas to connect with policymakers, industry partners, and others in ways that support programs and interventions that will continue to improve STEM transfer success beyond the life of the STP grant.

Each reconfiguration and expansion of community creates new opportunities for equitable STEM access. While the data reported here demonstrate how networks of praxis support problem solving for STP teams, the impact of expanding the community goes beyond finding solutions to specific problems. Teams are learning new skills, developing new partnerships, and incorporating new resources into their work in ways that create benefits for the college and university beyond STEM programs.

STEM Transfer Partnership: Advancing our Community

As we embark on the second year of the STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) initiative, we finally got our first chance to come together in person at our October convening in Ellensburg, Washington. Because our first convening had to be held remotely due to continuing pandemic precautions, we were thrilled to be able to finally meet everyone in person and make our community stronger through the informal exchanges that are difficult to facilitate in virtual settings.

The October event built upon all the previous work of the STP teams. It included celebrating progress since the April convening and moving forward within each partnership to advance interventions to engage and support low-income students and create innovative, durable transfer pathways. The teams presented a variety of different interventions they were working on. Many institutional pairs discussed new curricular structures while others described the steps they had taken in establishing undergraduate research experiences, creating transfer maps, mentorship networks, and inter-institutional student engagement programs.

Highlights of the day included roundtable discussions across topics such as curriculum, data sharing, low-income student support, and gathering student input. We also learned about STEM communities of transformation from our guest speaker, Dr. Sean Gehrke, Director of the Office of Educational Assessment at the University of Washington. Working in their teams, partnerships had opportunities to identify and dissect current barriers to their work and develop strategies to garner external support for their programs. Each team produced a poster that summarized and motivated their partnership initiatives, articulating an “elevator pitch” designed to engage stakeholders outside their partnership. We concluded the day with a lively ‘gallery walk,’ where teams shared their posters and their elevator pitch among all the convening participants.

One of the key goals of this convening was to foster a cross-partnership exchange of ideas and community building. To that end, the convening agenda balanced sessions dedicated to work within teams and in ones that involved interaction with other teams. Teams had opportunities to brainstorm creative solutions with other teams and learn about the many different strategies for low-income student support and enhanced transfer processes. For many participants, this dynamic was the key benefit of the convening. One post-event survey respondent commented, “It was really nice just to meet people who are interested in similar things across the state and feel like we have allies.” Another respondent identified their key benefit from the convening, “Having a community to consult with and bounce ideas off of – we are able to streamline a bit more, not everyone re-inventing the wheel. Having engaging discussions about why this is important and creating that community culture.” We were excited to see and later hear about these productive exchanges and will continue to strengthen and expand our community of practice.

We are so gratified to be a part of this process, working with dedicated professionals who took time out of their overcrowded schedules to come together in community with us. Together we are advancing equity by expanding STEM education opportunities for low-income students across the state.

What can help your transfer partnerships?

Recognizing that transfer partnerships can help ease the navigation process for transfer students, we are excited to share the article recently published by CCRI team members, Ling Yeh and Lia Wetzstein, in the journal Community College Review. Titled Institutional Partnerships for Transfer Student Success: An Examination of Catalysts and Barriers to Collaboration, the article is a synthesis of our research describing what promotes and inhibits transfer partnership formation and continuation. We are eager to publicize the article with the anticipation that the information within can be used by 2-year and 4-year institutional partners to find and leverage assets and remove obstacles to their growth and persistence.

Institutional collaborations are being recognized as important to improve transfer student outcomes. Recent literature on transfer partnerships has been focused on describing characteristics of those collaborations. In this study, we conceptualized transfer partnerships as dynamic systems that continually change over time, and we look at the forces that facilitate that change. We feel this is important as partnerships have a greater chance of growth and persistence when created strategically and with an understanding of what forces diminish or enhance their existence.

We analyzed institutional culture, policies and practices of successful transfer partnerships and found that the catalyst and barriers sat at the intersection of culture and practice, policy and practice and policy and culture. We also found that catalysts and barriers can serve as counter forces. And thus present the catalysts and barriers in a force field, with catalysts pushing toward partnerships and barriers preventing their growth or sustainability. The article provides practitioners with an analytical tool, the force field analysis, to examine their own institutional context and what forces might be impacting a transfer partnership’s development, growth, or sustainability. It allows for strategic decision making around leveraging or creating catalysts and removing barriers, to grow the transfer partnerships.

Creating a transfer partnership that centers equity can benefit racially marginalized, low-income, and first-generation transfer students by supporting their journey to and through baccalaureate attainment. Having more equitable student outcomes as a partnerships’ values and goals, and multiple engaged leaders across partner institutions, can serve to impact both institutional equity goals and enhance the partnership itself. We hope this article can help support institutions working together to impact student outcomes and facilitate more institutional collaborations.

Structuring STEM Transfer Partnership Success

CCRI’s STEM Transfer Partnership (STP) program has been working with colleges and universities across Washington state to tackle one of the key barriers to low-income student STEM degree attainment: transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions in the STEM fields. Though numerous interventions for transfer pathways have been designed and implemented, there remains a need for effective and sustainable models of transfer partnership that address the specific needs of STEM transfer students. In our first data note of this new series, Structuring STEM Transfer Partnership Success, we address this problem by drawing upon data from the first six months of the STP program.

Programs to expand access to STEM education and support low-income students have proliferated in the last twenty years, funded and motivated by federal and state interest in diversifying the STEM workforce and expanding educational equity. However, these interventions are often difficult to sustain and limited to a relatively small number of students. How can we create lasting change in the STEM transfer process that supports student success? How can we expand the impact of STEM interventions beyond an individual college or university or a select cohort of students? In our most recent data note we address these questions by closely examining the initial steps of the STP program. Drawing upon data from a variety of sources, including surveys, researcher observation, and document analysis, we highlight effective strategies and describe key challenges. We identify three key strategies for addressing the fault lines of previous interventions: engaging institutional participants as architects in their own institutional transformations, structuring partnerships through flexible protocols, and overcoming silos through community.

One key finding in our analysis of the initial stages of STP is the importance of engaging faculty, staff, and administration as problem solvers in their own transfer partnerships. Rather than imposing a predetermined plan for STEM transfer improvement upon the diverse range of colleges and universities in the program, STP invites participants to draw upon their institutional knowledge and contextually specific strategies to draft their own plan for transformation. Beginning with the application process and continuing throughout the program, participants were able to tailor interventions to the resources and student body at their institutions. Participants responded with energy to this approach, reflecting critically on past collaborations and future potential for partnership. After engaging in this series of self-led reflections and analyses, participants expressed optimism for positive change. Despite differences in location and institutional culture, they embraced the idea of taking concrete steps to solidify connections and build durable transfer pathways.

Though participant leadership in transformation was key, we also found balance between flexibility and structure was essential. In order to break down the enormous task of changing well-established transfer processes at their institutions, participants completed a series of self-assessments, beginning with less structured brainstorming and moving into more specific reflection and planning with structured protocols that took big problems apart into actionable steps. Survey participants overwhelmingly reported these protocols as key in moving their partnership forward.

Finally, we found that community-building was the foundation from which participants were empowered to dismantle disciplinary and institutional silos. In both observation and survey data, we found evidence that coming together in conversation with others that shared their commitment to equity in STEM pathways was beneficial. The shared community helps participants see the broader landscape, establish cross-institutional connections, and reframe their own experiences in terms of systemic patterns instead of isolated barriers.

This data note describes the hopeful first steps toward a cultural shift in how we think about STEM fields and student transfer. Creating more equitable pathways for STEM degree attainment is a formidable task. We hope the data and analysis reported here will open up a conversation for researchers and practitioners for further action for STEM equity.

STEM transfer partners: A community of practice

A cornerstone of CCRI’s current work is building innovative transfer partnerships and equipping two-year and four-year institutions with the resources, knowledge, support, and time to develop partnerships between their institutions to improve student outcomes. The STEM Transfer Partnerships project launched this year and met for the first time in April, convening all 10 teams to begin our journey as a community of practice. The convening was designed to foster community, share information, and establish a roadmap for institutional transformation in order to improve STEM transfer success for low-income students. Together we identified barriers to degree completion and the steps to support transfer for low-income STEM students.

Our intention for the convening was that teams would get to know each other and us, reflect on their partnership, and begin drafting an individualized action plan. The project design prioritized productive time for team members to connect and take the initial steps in planning their partnership. Each of the team sessions was guided by partnership planning tools, and problem-solving protocols that provided structure and support to teams as they tackled the complex task of dismantling transfer barriers for low-income students. Each planning tool built successively on the previous one to culminate in a team action plan to improve their low-income STEM transfer student outcomes. We began by asking team members to define their current level of partnership and then set goals for their partnership in the future. After assessing where they are now and where they would like to be, teams had an opportunity to brainstorm opportunities for improvement. Many shared that using our planning tools, provided a framework that helped tremendously as they worked through identifying action items for the project. We were delighted to receive feedback that these breakout sessions were the most useful part of the day.

Overall we heard from participants that they learned a lot from one another, including new perspectives and great practical ideas. They commented how helpful it was to see that they are not alone in their experience of the challenges of their work. They also felt, as we do, that building trust and connection among faculty and staff and between institutions is key to growing successful partnerships.

We are grateful for our collaborators and we are impressed by the level of engagement of over 80 participants (on Zoom no less!), which is a testament to everyone’s deep level of commitment and dedication to this critical and timely work. A participant said, early on in the day, that this was the most time they had spent talking with their partner institution colleagues and what they were learning was very valuable. This latter comment speaks to the focus for our first STEM Transfer Partnerships data note to be published this summer. This publication will take a look at how transfer partnerships shift institutional culture from being siloed in their approach to supporting transfer students to one that strengthens the bridge from the 2- to 4-year institutions for students through interconnected policies and practices. Stay tuned!