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: Cultures of Collaboration- Making Transfer Happen

Transfer, whilst an individual’s choice, does not come easy. There are many considerations when approaching the decision to move from one locale of education to another. Just as it is difficult for students, institutions must also work through the difficulties of losing certain students or moving them through different phases of their collegiate careers. At CCRI, we recognize these points as critical and unique experiences of transfer. As such, we centered a “Culture of Collaboration” as the backbone of the CCRI mission for transfer partnerships.

In this culture, we are dedicated to four guiding principles that allow the success of the program to continue well beyond what we can hope for. These principles are as follows: student-centered focus, win-win perspective, equal commitment to the partnership, and web of connections. These principles have allowed countless students to go through the transfer process feeling more confident and supported whilst also supporting the means of connecting institutions to one another in an equity and student-forward framework.

You can learn more about this dynamic framework HERE.

AAAS 2020

Transfer, as a critical component of student life and educational function, deserves increasing recognition and collaborative effort put forth, and we have extended ourselves above and beyond to do just that. Many of our institutions continually fulfill those connections and build up those pathways for our students to succeed. As such, in honor of National Transfer Student Week, we want to recognize our amazing members of the institutions working to continue to support and build these pathways just as much as it is vital to recognize the incredible students who have directed our research into this phenomenon.

NTSW: Overcoming the Turbulent Period of COVID-19 Through CCRI Student Support

MoveInDay_2020 072.jpg

With Transfer being one of the most understudied yet most frequently occuring phenomena in higher education, it is important to recognize the functions at play involving societal inequities that continually contribute to adversities transfer students face. Considering transfer students already deal with intense adjustments depending on the institutions they come from (i.e. new requirements, new social communities, and completely readjusting their own approach to participation in contrasting cultural even linguistic circumstances), providing students with adequate connections, staffing support, and guidance becomes a much-needed tool in their tool kit for success.

Attending to student needs, overall, has taken a massive shift since the pandemic. Being a transfer student during this time poses a unique challenge of navigating two big transitions as they adapt to a new institution. One is the online learning environment and adjusting to regulations and rules that continue to change, and one is related to returning to the “normal” standards of the school (something students are unaccustomed to because of the pandemic’s influence).

The CCRI team sought to raise awareness on transfer student needs during this time. Our researchers, Debra Bragg, Lia Wetzstein, Elizabeth Apple Meza, & Theresa (Ling) Yeh analyzed different methodologies to support students and bolster their success during this unstable period. Read more about this in Data Note 11 of the Transfer Partnership Series.

NTSW: Prioritizing Student Input- Key Components of Our Dedication to Transfer Success

As our main goals are dedicated to supporting our transfer students in their journeys, we highly prioritize student input on how we can better our program. As such, we made sure to expand our outreach to our students, inquiring about improvements for the pathway and any and all adjustments we could make that would allow our students every opportunity for success in their respective goals.

Team members Leandra Cate, Lia Wetzstein, and Katie Kovacich created intricate surveys and structured feedback from students to gain both formal and informal data regarding how best to support the transfer student population. Emphasis on one-on-one faculty connections, degree specific inquiry, and navigational avenues to understand their educational requirements were just a few of the dynamic pieces that students provided. All of these components lend themselves to the important success of the Transfer Partnership success, lending stronger promise for the continuance and future of others within the program.

You can read more about this process HERE

20230420_Lettuce Eaters_2169.jpg

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

National Transfer Student Week

Happy National Transfer Student Week! Transfer students are an important part of the University of Washington community. As such, we wanted to highlight and celebrate the amazing community of Transfer students and prospective transfer students at our acclaimed university. Make sure to check out the amazing list of events to be held during the week at UW: https://transfer.uw.edu/stages/become-a-husky/transfer-student-celebration-week/info-page/

College Friends

Don’t forget to explore a full list of resources provided on the NTSW Website for more information:

https://www.nists.org/national-transfer-student-week

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 3 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.

New Research Scientist Mayra Nunez Martinez

It is with great pleasure that we introduce our newest research scientist, Mayra Nunez Martinez whose research centers on reimagining and transforming postsecondary institutions to better serve historically underserved students and communities. Informed from both personal and professional experiences her research is accountable to examining the racial and spatial inequities that rural Latine/x students face in higher education. She brings a unique lens to CCRI’s work, particularly for our grant on Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success funded by Ascendium Education Group. She understands that it is critical to better support these communities, as rural communities are often excluded from national conversations around education, and there are substantive gaps in the literature for issues in rural higher education.

As a first-generation, DACAmented Mexicana and former college access advisor and high school teacher, she is committed to removing the systemic and structural barriers that exist for underserved communities in accessing higher education. Currently, she is working toward her Ph.D. in School Organization and Education Policy at the University of California, Davis. Her dissertation work examines how institutional and structural factors influence rural Latine/x students’ community college transfer decisions and outcomes.

“As educators and scholars, we must critically analyze policies, programs, and resources to make college accessible for all students by acknowledging the unique needs of students based on their intersectional identities and experiences.”

Through her collaborations on various projects as a graduate student researcher for the California Education Lab and Wheelhouse, she supported data collection, analyses, and dissemination of research related to higher education access and equity issues. For example, she contributed to projects examining factors influencing Latinx community college choice, first-time Latinx students’ and parents’ college choices during the pandemic, and how recruitment and outreach strategies can be more culturally and linguistically inclusive at emerging Hispanic serving institutions. From these experiences she learned the importance of using mixed research methods and centering students’ voices to understand how institutional practices and educational policies should be more responsive to their unique challenges and needs and how academic research utilizing researcher-practitioner partnerships can inform policy and practice.

These opportunities have provided her with invaluable experience that will contribute to CCRI’s research in this and other areas as well as continue to gain more tools for advancing educational equity to postsecondary opportunities for rural Students of Color.

CCRI Team Attending November Rural Learners Convening in Minneapolis!

In November, our CCRI team will be attending an in-person convening in advance of the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE) conference in Minneapolis, Minnesota, hosted by Ascendium and the American Institutes of Research. We look forward to meeting with other grantees who are part of the Building Evidence to Increase Rural Learner Success Initiative! To learn more about fellow grantees and their projects, click here.

CCRI research scientist Mayra Nunez Martinez will also be presenting her work that examines how geography impacts transfer rates for rural Latinx students in California on Saturday, November 18th, at 2:00 p.m. Browse sessions by person via the ASHE Conference Portal or view the conference schedule.

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.