Examining Past NSF Grants: A Step Toward More STEM Graduates

April 2, 2014

Each year, the National Science Foundation (NSF) spends tens of millions of dollars pursuing one of its highest priorities: increasing the number of students entering and completing degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). In fact, the NSF set a goal of increasing the number of well-prepared graduates with STEM degrees by one-third, or about one million graduates, by 2020. At the same time, the NSF seeks to improve the quality of STEM education at all levels, noting that maintaining American preeminence in these fields of study is critical to the country’s continued global economic success.

Eric Grodsky, Associate Professor of Sociology and Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and WCER researcher, recognized that more might be learned by collectively studying the STEM grants awarded through the NSF’s Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Talent Expansion Program (STEP). A new $1.3 million NSF grant awarded to Grodsky and Chandra Muller of the University of Texas–Austin, titled “Building on STEP to Understand STEM Entry and Persistence,” will do just that.

“The NSF awards about 15 to 20 STEP grants every year. It seems to us all of these experiments can be studied in a more systematic way to uncover how these projects do or don’t succeed in increasing the number of students who enter and complete bachelor’s degrees in STEM fields,” Grodsky said.

The study will focus on college students in their first few semesters, looking particularly at what classes they take and majors they choose and how the innovative practices designed and implemented by STEP grants influence those choices. To help the NSF increase the diversity of STEM majors and professionals, the study will also investigate the potentially varied impact of STEP interventions on students based on their gender, race, and ethnicity.

Following data collection, Grodsky and Muller intend pursue several lines of inquiry, including a study of how STEM students’ performance influences (or fails to influence) their beliefs about their future grades by student gender, the value students ascribe to STEM courses and majors, and the interpersonal relationships from which students draw personal and academic support.

Grodsky said that being able to scan the entire collection of STEP experiments opens enormous potential to meet NSF objectives, such as gaining a better understanding of the pathways students follow into and out of STEM fields, and the differences in STEM interest and persistence that exist among various types of students.

“The study very much complements the NSF’s core mission of getting more students into STEM,” Grodsky said. “The NSF needs better data on how and whether their projects are working. Having a systematic data-collection effort guided by theory gives the NSF that opportunity.”

In addition to learning how STEP projects influence student success in STEM fields, Grodsky and Muller hope to explore other longstanding research interests, including the study of socioeconomic inequalities in college attendance and completion and the role information about college readiness plays in high school students’ college preparatory behavior.

“We want to look under the hood and understand the mechanisms at work underneath what’s happening as students are making decisions regarding STEM fields,” Grodsky says.