CSU STEM Collaboratives Request for Proposals
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CSU STEM Collaboratives
Request for Proposals
Key Dates and Information:
RFP Release Date: May 15, 2014
Proposal Due Date: September 15, 2014
Award Notification: October 15, 2014
Initial Meeting of Awarded Campuses: October 27-28, 2014
Maximum Sub-Grant Award Amount: $375,000 ($150,000 per year)
Sub-Grant Project Duration: 30 months (2.5 years)
Program Overview:
An award from The Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust will fund CSU STEM Collaboratives to provide immersive educational STEM experiences beginning the summer before college and continuing through the entire first year at the CSU.
The Office of the Chancellor invites proposals for STEM Collaboratives from CSU campus teams to scale success and equity strategies for majors in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math.
CSU STEM Collaboratives will incorporate and integrate high-impact,1, 2 evidence-based3 educational practices (HIPs) on three concurrent fronts:
· authentic STEM summer experiences to take place prior to fall of the freshman year;
· first-year experiences that cross departmental, disciplinary, and divisional lines to engage STEM students through the first full academic year; and
· redesign of introductory, gateway courses critical for engagement and success in STEM.
Participating sites will intentionally integrate all three of the interventions listed above into a comprehensive offering and join a networked CSU learning community to build an evidence-based case for long-term changes to CSU STEM education.
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1. High-Impact Educational Practices. https://www.aacu.org/leap/hip.cfm
2. High-Impact Practices; http://teachingcommons.cdl.edu/geengage/high_impact_practices/index.html
3. Fairweather, J. (2008) Linking Evidence and Promising Practices in Science, Technology, Engineering, and
Mathematics (STEM) Undergraduate Education, http://www.nsf.gov/attachments/117803/public/Xc--Linking_Evidence--Fairweather.pdf
Call to Action
This project is designed to apply grass-roots expertise and strong, continuous evaluation to solve two persistent problems in STEM education: student attrition and institutional inertia.
Attrition is steepest at entry, particularly for the students historically underserved by present educational practice: ethnic minorities, those who are eligible for financial aid, and those whose parents didn’t attend college. As reported in 20124 by the President’s Council of Advisors for Science and Technology (PCAST), most of the students who leave STEM majors do so in the first two years, and while in good academic standing:
“In the United States, fewer than 40% of the students who enter college with the intention of majoring in a STEM field complete a STEM degree. Most of the students who leave STEM fields switch to non-STEM majors after taking introductory science, math, and engineering courses. Many of the students who leave STEM majors are capable of the work, making the retention of students who express initial interest in STEM subjects an excellent group from which to draw some of the additional one million STEM graduates.
“Many students who transfer out of STEM majors perform well, but they describe the teaching methods and atmosphere in introductory STEM classes as ineffective and uninspiring.”
The same national patterns identified by PCAST appear in the CSU. Fewer than a third of the students who entered the CSU in Fall 2005 declaring majors in STEM had earned STEM degrees six years later. For students from under-represented minority groups (URM: Native American, African-American, and Latino) the six-year STEM graduation rate is half that, or 17%. That is, of every six of these students who want STEM degrees, only one will make it.5 Degree completion rates for other at-risk and differentially-abled groups - even by gender in some STEM disciplines - are similarly disappointing.
Related to the chronic attrition problem is one of institutional inertia. CSU faculty members have worked for decades to improve delivery of STEM education, with repeated concentration on gateway courses in particular. At the same time, our universities are national leaders in proven interventions like summer bridge and first-year experiences.
Yet these innovations have defied integration and systemization at scale. Instead they survive on grant money and the goodwill of individual faculty and administrators, making them vulnerable to economic downturns, staffing turnover, or sheer fatigue.
The premise of this project is that the CSU already has all the incoming students and pedagogical evidence that it needs to provide California with an ample and diverse supply of STEM graduates. What’s missing is a new conception of the status quo, with sustained faculty and professional development and other administrative structures that build engaging, evidence-based practices into curriculum, policy, the business model, and day-to-day practice, so that our best work is offered consistently, systematically, and reliably.
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4. Engage to Excel (2012) http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/microsites/ostp/pcast-engage-to-excel-final_feb.pdf
5. The Consortium for Student Retention Data Exchange (CSRDE), http://csrde.ou.edu/web/index.html
Eligibility
All California State Universities are eligible to apply. For this RFP, STEM is defined as Life and Physical Sciences, Engineering, Mathematics and Information Technology, excluding Social and Health Sciences. STEM Collaboratives should embrace National Research Council recommendations that STEM learning incorporate common practices, crosscutting concepts, and disciplinary core ideas by which STEM students “investigate, model, communicate, and explain the natural and designed world.”
Proposal Review Criteria:
1. Proposals must provide a high-level problem statement supported by data. The problem statement should capture the campus STEM student status quo. In answer, proposals must describe a strategy to improve STEM education with a comprehensive offering that integrates a STEM-focused summer experience, continuing into a related first-year experiences and redesign of introductory STEM gateway courses.
Note: Any interventions proposed in addition to these three should include a strategy for connecting them to the first three and measuring their efficacy, either because the campus already has evidence of effectiveness or because it would do so as part of the STEM Collaborative project.
2. Successful proposals will provide evidence the campus is familiar with and planning to use high-impact practices associated with summer STEM experiences, first-year experiences and pedagogies to engage and retain all STEM students. Special attention should be paid to closing achievement gaps between different groups of students, especially those who are underrepresented in STEM disciplines, Pell-eligible and first-generation to attend college. Proposals will include baseline data demonstrating past success designing and offering effective component HIPs to demonstrate campus readiness for this comprehensive redesign work. Other precursor evidence, demonstrating readiness for sustained change, might include receipt of NIH MARC, RISE, NSF TUES/CCLI (including participation in the Council on Undergraduate Research CCLI II or III programs), NSF STEP or similar education-focused grants. That is, proposals should feature existing programs and ongoing work that might benefit from integration efforts supported by STEM Collaboratives.
3. Proposals must include a plan to collect data and information to monitor and evaluate the STEM Collaborative programming and its effect on student learning and campus culture compared to the baseline status upon proposal submission.
4. Proposed STEM Collaboratives must provide evidence of and deliberate plans for deep, broad and collaborative campus involvement, to include (as relevant to proposed activities) senior leadership from administration and faculty governance organizations, student leadership, multiple divisions and departments, institutional research, part-time as well as full-time STEM faculty, and staff familiar with business processes, academic transcripting, orientation and advising. While we recognize that not all proposals would depend on participation from all the parties listed here, reviewers will be looking for evidence of broad and inclusive collaboration, since the need for integration is a central premise of this project.
5. Successful proposals will communicate a sense of urgency and describe how proposed strategies will lead to a new, sustainable and improved status quo, by building on prior work and ongoing efforts (possibly from other funding streams) and integrating them in a scaling-up process so that all students majoring in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math will be impacted. The comprehensive offering should be designed to maximize the number of STEM students involved during the grant period, if all STEM majors will not yet be impacted.
6. Proposals must describe faculty development activities to build expertise in current, effective pedagogies (evidence-based6 or “scientific teaching”7), methods to better engage with students in and outside the classroom, and dispositional learning. Proposals must describe how such practices will become the norm among STEM instructional staff. Proposals should feature ongoing efforts in this area, including faculty participation at National Academies/HHMI or AAC&U summer institutes, for instance.
7. Proposed projects must include a plan to evaluate, publish, share with and disseminate work and program outcomes to CSU colleagues, both within their campus communities and system-wide.
Proposal reviewers will look for an appetite for deep and lasting change, in structures of funding, ongoing faculty and professional development, cross-divisional and cross-departmental relationships, and evidence-based pedagogy.
What Funded Universities Will Do
One of the project’s guiding hypotheses is that a more seamless, sequential approach to the period between admission and the start of the second year will promote improved student persistence, deeper subject-matter learning, and more dispositional learning such as resilience, determination, and grit, while also reducing achievement gaps and improving persistence into subsequent terms. A goal of the project is to test the assumption that three interrelated interventions together can improve student learning and can help increase persistence in STEM majors, while also reducing student achievement gaps. Of particular interest is the campus culture and administrative support needed to effectively integrate multiple high-impact practices, to coordinate the “hand-off” from summer into fall between staff and faculty instructors, and to build wraparound first-year interventions involving student affairs into day-to-day classroom practice in introductory courses. The Office of the Chancellor will build a network of STEM Collaboratives to share best practices and lessons learned, support student-level data collection and convene campus teams annually to facilitate discussions about changing the STEM student experience. Funded CSU universities will:
1. Integrate a STEM summer experience, first-year experience, and gateway course redesign into a coherent, intentional comprehensive experience for all students majoring in STEM. The first six months of the grant can be used for planning, but new programming must be offered to STEM students starting in the summer 2015. It is expected that administrative structures to build engaging, evidence-based practices into curriculum policy, the business model and day-to-day practice will continue to evolve and iterate through the remainder of the grant period. Revisions based on campus assessment of “what worked” in the first instance of programming will be possible, in consultation with system-wide project leadership.
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6. Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering
http://sites.nationalacademies.org/DBASSE/BOSE/DBASSE_072106
7. Handelsman, Ebert-May, Beichner, Bruns, Chang, DeHaan, Gentile, Lauffer, Stewart, Tilghman & Wood (2004) Scientific Teaching. Science 304: 521-522.
2. Use project resources to organize and scale faculty development and professional development to effect continuous improvement of STEM education in multiple departments and divisions, particularly in gateway courses, as integrated into a broader institutional approach.
3. Identify a campus-based Project Coordinator and key team members for the duration of the project. The STEM Collaboratives Project Coordinator (this may or may not be the Principal Investigator) will facilitate faculty and professional development, cross-divisional communication, outreach to stakeholders within and beyond the campus community, interactions with the Office of the Chancellor, and submissions of research data to the project evaluators. The campus team will host and organize annual, campus-wide workshops or seminars for STEM faculty and staff to review data and progress of the STEM Collaborative project. The conditions of the grant require that salary support for Project Coordinators taper off over the duration of the grant as the campus absorbs the role into the new status quo.
Note: CSU STEM Collaboratives will be eligible for AmeriCorps Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA) members from July 2015 through July 2016, through a grant from the Corporation for National and Community Service to the Office of the Chancellor. CSU STEM VISTA members can assist Project Coordinators with scaling of the project work and capability building on campus.
4. Join a networked learning community with other participating CSU campuses. The purpose of STEM Collaboratives is to surface and consolidate best educational practices around the CSU system, identifying common elements and building a case for taking them to consistent system-wide scale. Doing so will require ongoing communication among all participating campuses, and a willingness to learn from – and adopt – each other’s strategies. Campus project teams funded by this grant will attend and make presentations at recurring annual meetings at the Chancellor’s office in Long Beach. The Chancellor’s Office will provide lodging and meals during meetings.
5. Contribute to the project’s research and evaluation and disseminate campus findings. Although the CSU expects work during this grant to produce a larger and more diverse pool of STEM students, in the long run the goal is for these changes to last. That is, the work of STEM Collaboratives is evaluative as much as it is programmatic. Each university that participates will commit to making available to project leadership student-record-level data. In addition funded campuses should be prepared to share learning metrics or evaluations related to STEM Collaboratives component-level and course-level offerings. Of particular importance is the commitment to contribute to, support, and guide enhancements to the CSU Student Success Dashboard, as developed by the Graduation Initiative. Modifications to the Dashboard will aggregate records of student participation in STEM Collaboratives, including involvement in particular interventions and migration into and out of STEM majors. CSU STEM Collaboratives will share first-hand accounts of work under this grant after the project has ended, for example at national conferences, in publications, and in particular with the CSU’s other institutions, Trustees, and central administration.
Campuses are expected to work with the external evaluator to disseminate surveys to faculty, staff and students, help set up focus groups drawn from participating faculty, students, staff and administrators, and to arrange for project staff and key faculty participate in interviews. We expect the frequent, intentional use of real-time data on campuses to influence modifications in program design, and to model data-based decision making.
Lastly, each campus will conduct evaluationsofeach programcomponent implemented as part of the STEM Collaboratives and report the results of these evaluations to the external evaluator and system office.