Presentations: Session D

Partnerships between higher education institutions and industry partners can help align academic skills with industry career needs and support underserved students in STEM career pathways. The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, MO, is the world's largest non-academic plant/ag science research institute. Our PIs research projects have practical applications and solutions for private industry. The Center partners with educational institutions to support K-12, undergraduate, and graduate programs.

Community partnerships can help reach diverse student populations and prepare them for careers in STEM. The JJK Food Agriculture Nutrition Innovation Center is an example of a partnership between the Danforth Center, the University of Illinois, and the Jackie Joyner-Kersey Foundation, offering STEAM+Ag after-school and summer programming to high school students from disadvantaged communities. The program also provides internships at the Danforth Center and other plant and agriculture science companies in St. Louis and scholarships for agriculture degrees at UIUC, supporting students of color in obtaining life and agriculture science undergraduate degrees.

The Danforth Center's partnership with St. Louis Community College provides dual enrollment/credit life science programming, addressing the challenge of transporting high school students to campus or finding accredited high school teachers to provide community college courses. The center trains postdoctoral fellows in pedagogy and classroom management to teach certificate courses at high schools, reducing barriers for underserved high school students to obtain a life science certificate.

Industry-led Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences provide whole classrooms of STEM students with real-world collaborations with industry scientists. For non-research academic institutions, this provides a unique opportunity for students to engage in authentic research and build industry-desired skills.

Public-private partnerships offer unique collaborations that can support institutional change to better prepare students for STEM careers.

Undergraduate research experiences (UREs) have been shown to improve both persistence and graduation rates for women and students of color (Alquicira et al. 2022). Although these effects are observed broadly across higher education, they are especially pronounced in the context of the STEM fields (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2017). Although community colleges disproportionately enroll students who can most benefit from UREs, structural barriers make UREs rare at community colleges (Hewlett 2018).
This change project, based at a mid-sized community college in Washington State, is part of the state's Consortium for Undergraduate Research and Equity (CURE) and aspires to address the paucity of community college research opportunities in STEM through the design and implementation of a year-long research project for students enrolled in the primary course sequence for biology majors (approximately 50-100 annually). The project's underlying theory of change is twofold. First, two local community partners and four science faculty use backward design to create a research project that embeds laboratory skills and learning outcomes in a year-long URE. Second, participating faculty replace the entire lab curriculum in the college's three-course biology sequence with this applied year-long research project.
Incorporating applied research into the college's biology curriculum demystifies and democratizes inquiry-based research for first-generation, underrepresented, and/or academically underprepared students, who also may not have the financial privilege to participate in an unpaid internship that affords them such an experience. Preliminary findings from this change initiative will focus on project goals related to creating equitable access across a range of outcomes including demographic participation rates, the development of professional STEM research skills, and the extent to which UREs enhance a community college student's sense of belonging among a larger scientific community.

The Holistic Oasis for Parents' Education (HOPE) Program utilizes a two-generation approach (student parents and their children), to increase access to STEM education among underrepresented groups. This program offers student-parents enrolled in summer courses support services while providing an on-campus engaging STEM-focused summer academic program for children. The HOPE three-dimensional (3D) model consists of family (pre-K and STEM academy, wellness and parenting workshops, nutritious food); academic (tuition gap assistance, advising, structured study time); and professional (professional development, STEM colloquia) supports. The HOPE Program aims to address the issue of "time poverty" among student parents. According to Wladis et al. (2018), this lack of time results in poor quantity and quality of academic output and lower degree completion rates. A mixed methods approach to research includes the development and refinement of a questionnaire to evaluate HOPE's 3D Model. This questionnaire was given the first-year cohort and a quasi-control group of student parents not enrolled in the HOPE Program. A total of nine in-depth focus groups with HOPE participants were conducted during Year 1. The questionnaire results and the focus group themes will be discussed. Collaboration between a middle/ high school physics instructor and college physics instructor to create a STEM Toolkit for the HOPE STEM Academy, grounded in experiential learning opportunities, will be discussed. The HOPE Program is offered at Hostos Community College, CUNY, located in Bronx County which has the worse health outcomes in New York State. The HOPE Program was designed to promote access, equity, and inclusion among groups that have been historically marginalized in higher education.