Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory

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Paper ID #29081
Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory
Prof. Katherine Goodman, University of Colorado Denver
Katherine Goodman is assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, and the associate director
of Inworks, an interdisciplinary innovation lab. Her research focuses on transformative experiences in
engineering education. She is currently division chair of the Technological and Engineering Literacy -
Philosophy of Engineering Division (TELPhE).
Dr. Stephanie S Ivey, The University of Memphis
Dr. Stephanie Ivey is the Associate Dean for Research with the Herff College of Engineering and a Pro-
fessor with the Department of Civil Engineering at the University of Memphis. She directs the U of M’s
Intermodal Freight Transportation Institute, the Southeast Transportation Workforce Center and the West
TN STEM Hub. Her technical research includes focus on journey to school in urban areas, transportation
planning (particularly related to freight impacts), livability assessment in urban communities, and strate-
gies to engage citizens in the transportation planning process. She has a strong record of STEM workforce
and education research, with special emphasis on transportation workforce development, partnerships be-
tween industry and academia, and increasing representation of women and underrepresented minorities in
STEM.
Ivey is a member of the Executive Committee of the Institute of Transportation Engineers Diversity and In-
clusion Committee- STEM Sub Committee, the American Society of Civil Engineers National Engineers
Week/Discover-E Task Committee and the TRB Standing committee on Maintenance and Operations Per-
sonnel. She also serves on the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis Transportation Industry Council and the
Board of Directors for the Greater Memphis IT Council.
Craig O. Stewart, University of Memphis
Shani O’Brien, University of Colorado - Denver
Dr. Maryam Darbeheshti, University of Colorado Denver
Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering University of Denver, Denver CO
William Schupbach, University of Colorado Denver
Dr. Karen D Alfrey, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
Karen Alfrey is a Clinical Associate Professor in Biomedical Engineering and Associate Dean for Un-
dergraduate Academic Affairs and Programs in the School of Engineering and Technology at IUPUI. She
has been a member of ASEE since 2003.
c
American Society for Engineering Education, 2020

Launching the Urban STEM Collaboratory
Abstract
The Urban STEM Collaboratory is a tri-institution collaboration of University of Memphis
(UofM), University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver), and Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis (IUPUI). Each of the three partner universities is embedded in a large city, and
serves similar student populations, i.e. students who tend to be first generation, minorities, and/or
commuters. These universities encounter similar challenges in first-year retention and graduation
rates, especially in the STEM disciplines. As they strive to improve the first year engineering
and/or mathematics student experience at their campuses, they have engaged in different
approaches; including Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL), formation of an Engineering Learning
Community (ELC), and engaging students in outreach as STEM Ambassadors. Incorporating
these individual strengths with new activities that will be shared across institutions, the team is
currently embarking on a multi-year research project to uncover how students develop STEM
identity in an urban context, identify interventions that support this development, and determine
the impact that STEM identity has on student success. Through the support of an NSF S-STEM
grant, the three universities are also providing scholarships to students engaged in the project.
Here, we share the initial efforts of our tri-campus interaction and collaboration, our overarching
goals, our systems of recruiting students, and our initial collection of preliminary data and
findings for Year 1.
Introduction
The Urban STEM Collaboratory project supports academically talented students with
demonstrated financial need from the colleges/schools of engineering and mathematics
departments at the University of Memphis (UofM), the University of Colorado Denver (CU
Denver), and Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). However, awarding
talented students is only one element that this collaboration is using to promote the growth of a
STEM identity in their students. The Collaboratory is expected to generate new knowledge in
STEM education by investigating a variety of mechanisms for supporting a diverse set of
students in an urban context in their development of a STEM identity--the lack of which is a
fundamental reason students often select out of STEM majors and careers [1].
The funding for this project was awarded on October 1, 2018. Because this was after the
academic year had already begun, the team decided to delay funding of the first cohort of
scholars until 2019-20 so that the program could be implemented with fidelity to the original
project/cohort design. Thus, the remainder of the 2018-19 academic year was used for planning
and program development purposes.
The Urban STEM Collaboratory project goals are to:
1. Increase at each institution the recruitment, retention, student success, and graduation
rates of academically talented and financially needy undergraduate mathematical sciences
and engineering majors;
2. Implement ambitious but feasible strategies contributing to student academic success,
development of STEM identity, and workforce readiness;

3. Implement mechanisms to ensure substantial student participation in project activities
through a special badge system, incentivizing participation;
4. Implement activities for mathematics and engineering classes leading to a high
probability of student success, and conduct formative and summative evaluations with
special focus on determining effectiveness and impact of the project activities, strategies,
and adjustments;
5. Conduct a research study that will focus on developing an evidence-based understanding
of factors influencing development of STEM identity and the resulting impact on student
success, attitudes, workforce readiness, and STEM self-efficacy, with particular attention
to impact on first-generation and underrepresented students.
6. Conduct formative and summative evaluations of the project that explore the extent to
which each objective is being met. A particular impetus will be placed on determining
effectiveness and impact of the project activities, strategies, and adjustments made
throughout the project.
Given the urban setting of the three institutions, the research described in goal 5, above, focuses
not only on formation of STEM identity itself, but also looks for ways that urban context impacts
the formation of STEM identity of the students.
Recruitment of the First Cohort (2019-2020)
In general, each institution’s recruitment process was very similar. Each institutional
Collaboratory project team shared related items throughout this development process to help
foster consistency and produce the best product for each university. They shared verbiage for
recruitment flyers and outlines of the brief applications. All three made their applications
available online, two through their campus’s overall application process, and the other through
an external online system. All three had notices distributed via internal networks, particularly to
applying students who expressed interest in engineering and mathematics majors, and had flyers
sent via external recruitment networks and events. Once the applicant pools were developed,
each campus team reviewed applications (including recommendation letters) and developed a
prioritized list of students to consider for awards. The respective financial aid offices then
determined the exact scholarship eligibility. Note that CU Denver recruited only first-time
freshman; however, both IUPUI and UofM also recruited rising sophomores with an aim of
recruiting students who would be prepared to take Calculus I with the incoming freshman in the
case of IUPUI, and to develop a multi-level peer group in the case of UofM.
Table 1: Scholars Recruited by Campus
Incoming Freshman
Scholars Accepted
Existing Student
Scholars Accepted
CU Denver
14*
3
IUPUI
14
11
UofM
8
9
* CU Denver’s Engineering Learning Community includes nine students who did not receive
scholarships for two reasons: FAFSA requirements and project’s budget limitations.

Lessons Learned in Recruiting
In general, delays in recruitment were tied to miscommunication with the financial aid
departments. These were sometimes caused by student/family error in completing the FAFSA,
and at other times it was tied to institutional delays. On two of the campuses, students were
selected who were later found to have no unmet need, and the project teams needed to draw
further recipients from a waitlist. Also, the IUPUI team found that the inclusion of rising
sophomores who would be “calculus ready” by the following fall improved the diversity of their
cohort.
Table 2: Demographics of 2019-2020 Cohort
Percentages
UofM (n=17)
CU Denver (n=17)
IUPUI (n=25)
Male/Female*
53% / 47%
71% / 29%
68% / 32%
White
76%
35%
48%
Hispanic
6%
18%
16%
Asian
35%
16%
African American
18%
12%
12%
2 or more
8%
* No students selected other/ prefer not to identify
Bridge Programs
The summer bridge programs were designed to engage the Urban STEM Collaboratory students
in ice breaker activities and allow them to become acquainted with each other as well as the
faculty and staff. Because our fall semesters did not start the same week, CU Denver held their
bridge program one week earlier than the other two campuses. One aspect specific to the Urban
STEM Collaboratory summer bridge was an to introduce the social communications platform,
called Course Networking (the CN). A virtual joint (all campus) session was held on August 19,
2019 (the first day of school for CU Denver) via zoom. Students at each site prepared a skit or
other introduction to share with the other students engaged in the program.
Other aspects of the Bridge programs included quick design or problem solving challenges (CU
Denver, IUPUI), a mathematics review (UofM and IUPUI), locating campus resources such as
where tutoring sessions are held (CU Denver, IUPUI) and other workshops and activities
intended to support the transition to college. Project teams observed that students worked in
small groups, were highly engaged with one another and with faculty, and had visibly developed
a sense of community by the end of the program.
More about the CN
Course Networking (thecn.com) is a social media platform designed to connect students from
around the world. The Urban STEM Collaboratory is endeavoring to use this platform to connect
students from all three campuses in a more direct manner. After the initial meeting and training
during the bridge programs, organic use of the CN has been minimal, and one significant change
to the team’s strategy is now to guide that engagement more directly. For instance, the
engagement badges, described below, which students need to earn to remain scholars, are
recorded on the CN, and a few are tied to actual CN activity. Also, we have appointed two
scholars from each campus to be CN leads, who will try to increase engagement by adding

unique content, developing contests, and other posts that encourage the other students to both
post their own ideas and comment/reply to that of other students. The goal of the CN usage is to
help students reinforce their own STEM identity and by having a sense of belonging to not only
their local group of scholars, but also with students at the other campuses.
Figure 1: a post on the CN by one of the student CN Leads
Badges
Another method of engagement is our badging system. Badges are intended to nudge students
into behaviors that support them connecting to each other and to the campus, as well as
encouraging them to enact their STEM identity in the broader community. For instance, students
earn badges for participating on the CN, being active in the student chapters of groups such as
SWE or ASME, working at internships related to their majors, joining a research team, or
helping with campus STEM outreach programs. The badges are meant to be varied; no one needs
to earn them all to satisfy requirements for the Collaboratory. Badge work is documented by
creating a showcase on the CN, a small part of their profile that allows them to describe what
they did, insert a photo, or link to external websites. This provides practice for documenting their
work in portfolios as well as for presenting themselves to the world as STEM professionals.

Figure 2: The Urban STEM Collaboratory Badges
Unique Programs by Campus
There are unique aspects to each campus’s program. CU Denver’s program centers on the
Engineering Learning Community. The group of 25 students, 17 of which are scholars, take
some of their courses together and participate in weekly peer mentoring sessions. For Fall 2019,
all of the ELC took an introductory engineering design class, and many also took specific
sections of Calculus I and English Composition I. In Spring 2020, many are taking an
introductory computing course and Calculus II together. There is also a section of English
Composition II with reserved spaces for ELC students. In prior years, the ELC had only
mechanical engineering majors, and did not have scholarship support, and ELC participation
correlated positively with improved outcomes for students[2]. The ELC now spans all of the
engineering majors offered at CU Denver.
At IUPUI, the unique feature of their program is Peer-led Team Learning (PLTL), an
internationally used method for guiding students who have recently, successfully completed a
course to assist students. PLTL has been applied to various STEM disciplines; IUPUI has
implemented it in its math courses as part of its cohort model [3].
At UofM, Collaboratory students have the opportunity to serve as STEM Ambassadors, students
who engage in outreach throughout Memphis. There is some evidence that representing the
STEM fields to others increases students’ STEM identity, and this robust program gives the
students opportunities to do just that [4]. It is a stated goal of the Collaboratory to investigate
how each campus might replicate these features, in part or in whole, from the others.

Research Progress
Our initial research efforts have focused on deploying a STEM Identity survey. We intend to
distribute this periodically to the students to gauge changes in their sense of self related to STEM
work and their urban setting. At the time of writing, all three campuses have scheduled
interviews and are making progress on other means of gathering data related to our goals. Here
we present the initial results of the first administration of the STEM Identity Survey.
STEM Identity Survey
The first quantitative data collection cycle for this cohort of students began in Fall 2019 with a
survey of students’ perceptions of their identity as an engineer, their self-efficacy in engineering,
and their sense of belonging in their campus community overall. Questions for this survey were
pulled from a STEM identity survey developed by Godwin, Potvin, Hazari, and Lock [5], with
some added items relating to feelings of safety from the National Survey of Student Engagement
(NSSE) [6]. In total, 35 students across the three campuses completed the survey. One additional
student completed most of the survey and their responses were retained (see N=36 in Table 1 for
questions completed by the partial response case). The response scale for the survey is as
follows: 1 – Strong Disagree, 2 – Disagree, 3 – Somewhat Disagree, 4 – Somewhat Agree, 5 –
Agree, 6 – Strongly Agree, such that a higher mean for an item indicates a stronger level of
agreement from the students. A sample list of survey items and descriptive statistics can be found
in Table 1. This shows 11 of the 45 items.
Table. 1. Sample Items with Descriptive Statistics from STEM identity survey
N
Mean
Std. Deviation
My parents see me as an engineer.
36
4.94
.86
My instructors see me as an engineer.
36
4.67
.76
My peers see me as an engineer.
36
4.64
.99
I am interested in learning more about engineering.
36
5.89
.32
I enjoy learning engineering
36
5.75
.44
I find fulfillment in doing engineering.
36
5.53
.61
I am confident that I can understand engineering outside of
class.
36
5.03
.77
I can do well on exams in engineering.
36
4.83
.66
I understand concepts I have studied in engineering.
36
4.94
.63
Others ask me for help in this subject.
36
4.08
.976
I can master the content in the engineering-related courses I
am taking this semester
36
4.94
.75

Overall, most student responses fell in the Somewhat Agree to Strongly Agree range (x=5.00),
indicating that most students feel positive, confident and comfortable in their identities as
engineering students. Students rarely used the “Strongly Disagree” category to respond to
questions and frequently used the “Strongly Agree” response. Anomalies of note include six
items with an average score of less than 4.50. Most interestingly, half of these lower scoring
items were related to the topic of design: “I have trouble recognizing the changes needed for a
design solution to work (reverse coded),” I can develop design solutions” and “I can evaluate a
design.” The other low scoring variables were: “I can build machines,” “Others ask for my help
in this subject” and “I am not confident that I can understand engineering in class (reverse
coded).” It should be noted that these low items include two of the three reverse coded items,
which may have lower averages due to survey response error. Responses to items related to
feeling safe on campus all averaged in the “Agree” range, indicating that students generally feel
safe and included in their engineering departments across all three campuses.
Discussion
While these initial survey results are highly encouraging to the project team, we are also aware
that our students will likely experience struggles during their college careers that cause these
indicators of STEM identity to fluctuate. They may also be responding out of a desire to fit in, a
phenomenon known as social desirability, which can skew survey results. As students refine and
clarify their own definitions of being STEM students becoming STEM professionals; we will
look for indicators that show this identity is becoming more robust or being challenged.
As urban serving institutions, UofM, CU Denver, and IUPUI are well situated to develop and
evaluate interventions to strengthen and diversify the STEM workforces in their cities and across
the country. While sharing an urban serving mission, these campuses also vary along a variety of
dimensions—region, demographics, economics. Likewise, the interventions at each campus vary
to serve these different urban communities. These variations will be a challenge for the research
team, as they limit how much direct comparison among the three schools’ cohorts can be made.
However, they also represent opportunities to evaluate the common program components within
different contexts as well as to learn what unique components may or may not be adaptable
across them.
UofM found that the entering freshmen in their cohort struggled significantly both academically
and with the college transition. Individualized interventions (tutoring, counseling, and
connections to other campus resources) were necessary, and even with this several students
failed courses and were put on probation for the spring semester. The students that ended up on
probation were also the students that failed to participate in Collaboratory activities and meet
regularly with project faculty serving as mentors in the fall. These students are participating in
required meetings with the project team this spring to develop a structured plan for ensuring
success, and also appear to now be more open to support. Part of that support, on each campus, is
a system of mentoring.
As part of the continued research work, we also aim to gather secondary information from
mentors, who are older students at CU Denver and faculty at UofM and IUPUI. As feedback
from mentoring meetings is gathered, and this data may be used to create a fuller picture of the
students’ development of identity, alongside the survey results.
Summary of Progress in the Collaboratory

Research efforts are increasing, including scheduling the spaced re-administration of the STEM
identity survey, adapting survey instruments to measure identity “gaps,” and a new survey to
understand students’ commuting patterns (part of the urban influence on their STEM identity).
At the time of writing, semi-structured interviews with students had begun and focus group
interviews with mentors had been scheduled. We have some concerns about survey fatigue, and
are investigating the use of brief surveys, such as the visually-based, one-item STEM identity
survey from McDonald and colleagues [7].
There are indicators that the project team is making progress on the overall goals of the
Collaboratory as well. The feeling of community among students is well-underway on the
individual campuses as well as across the Collaboratory. This community (students and project
team) has already been fostered through work on CN, the bridge programs with individual and
joint efforts, online meetings, and, although in initial stages, interclass interactions.
Acknowledgements
We wish to recognize Mengyuan (Alice) Zhao as coordinator of our efforts on the CN, and
helping researchers access student activity on the CN. This paper directly reflects the work of all
PIs on the Urban STEM Collaboratory, from University of Memphis: Stephanie Ivey, James T.
Campbell, John Haddock, Aaron Robinson, and Craig Stewart; from University of Colorado
Denver: Maryam Darbeheshti, Michael Jacobson, Martin Dunn, and Tom Altman; from Indiana
University Purdue University Indianapolis: David Russomanno, Jeffrey Watt, Karen Alfrey,
Clayton Nicholas, Danny King, Terri Talbert-Hatch. This work is supported by NSF S-STEM
Grants: #1833987 (UofM), #1833983 (CU Denver), #1833817 (IUPUI).
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