CAUSE: CUNY Advancement in Undergraduate STEM Education

With support from the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this Track 2 project aims to research how to increase the number of Hispanic, low-income, and other minoritized students that continue to graduate school and/or ultimately enter research careers in clinical and translational psychology. Psychology is the largest undergraduate major at The City College of New York and it has been challenging to engage psychology students from historically excluded backgrounds in research early on, which is key to getting into graduate school and careers in these fields.

CAUSE will use early career exposure, scaffolded experiences, and research opportunities to increase the number of students from the target population that continue to graduate school and/or ultimately enter research careers in psychology, with a focus on designing interventions that support all cultural identities and science identity development. CAUSE will create a pipeline of programs for multiple stakeholder populations by expanding an existing partnership with a community college to engage their students, including after they transfer to CCNY.

The results of the research proposed by CAUSE will contribute to the literature regarding best practices for how to address the issues that tend to exclude Hispanic, low-income, and other historically under-represented students from entering STEM fields, particularly Psychology. CAUSE will also model ways to partner with community colleges to build a supportive pipeline with multiple entry points into a STEM field.

The specific aims of the project are to: i) develop a scalable, inclusive, and sustainable model for early exposure to research for psychology students in both community college and 4-year campus settings; ii) increase the number of psychology students graduating with research skills; iii) promote a culture of inclusion in psychology departments at CCNY and BMCC; iv) investigate the impacts of early exposure to research and experiential learning on retention and graduation of freshman and transfer students majoring in psychology; v) contribute to the literature on interventions that impact Hispanic and low-income undergraduate STEM students' success in social sciences majors/careers, as well as on student self-efficacy and science identity development. Using the Research Self-Efficacy Scale, the EPIC survey, and other tools, the proposed interventions will allow us to: 1) study how predictors of retention and success in STEM develop for Hispanic and low-income students; 2) understand how practices lowering the barrier to engagement in research increases the recruitment and retention of diverse undergraduate students; and 3) understand the impacts of interventions to increase the number of Hispanic, low-income, and other historically under-represented students exposed to and entering careers in psychology.

Students within the proposed programs will also contribute to research in the field of psychology by working with faculty on research projects. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.