Board # 21 : I get by with a little help from my PEEPS: Learning from an NSF S-STEM cohort scholarship program

PEEPS (Program for Engineering Excellence for Partner Schools) is an NSF S-STEM funded grant. In our third year of the project, we report some of the formative assessment of the scholarship program. Currently our students are in their 2 and 3 years in various engineering programs at a 4-year university. We find some interesting differences between our two cohorts of PEEPS, in terms of their transition from high school to college, their subsequent performance in college, and the interactions among and across the cohorts. While our cohort sizes are quite small, we are able to delve deeper into understanding individual student’s experiences and perspectives through surveys, periodic check-ins, social events, and an end-of-the-year focus group facilitated by a project evaluator. We not only report common institutional indicators, such as grade point averages and degree progress, but we will also integrate quantitative and qualitative findings that help us discern the effectiveness of different program components (e.g., cohort scheduling, study sessions, engineering success courses, mentoring, advising, and social events). The utilization and perceived benefit of available resources by the students is examined. We also describe some of our efforts in developing the metacognitive and self-regulation skills of the PEEPS students. Lastly, we propose next steps that examine institutional impacts. Background: Creating the PEEPS cohorts and program The Program for Engineering Excellence for Partner Schools (PEEPS) is a NSF S-STEM scholarship program, and was inspired by the Posse Foundation. At the California Polytechnic (“Cal Poly”) State University, we wished to create a program in which underrepresented students in engineering receive significant financial aid (up to $10k for at least 4 years) and a network of classmates, faculty, and staff to support them throughout their college career. Our term and acronym, “PEEPS,” captures the idea of a “posse,” “family” or “my peoples” as a group that supports and cares for one another. Our primary goal is to recruit, retain, and graduate academically talented, financially needy students from disadvantaged backgrounds to enter the engineering workforce. PEEPS recruits from our “Partner Schools,” which are high schools that have a large percentage of students who qualify for the National School Lunch program, and thus are likely to have low socioeconomic status and be first generation and/or underrepresented minorities (URM). Our recruitment methods and results have been published elsewhere, and are summarized in Table 1. To this date, we have two different cohorts and a total of 13 students. In this paper, we wish to report on progress of the program and what we’ve learned thus far. Table 1. Eligibility criteria and demographics for PEEPS scholarship program for 2 cohorts Cohort 1 Cohort 2 Criteria 2014 Partner School Financial need Accepted into ME 2015 Partner School EFC* < $12k Accepted into ME, CE, or ENVE First Generation # selected 6 7 majors ME, (CE, ENVE) CE, ENVE, ME %Female 17% 43% %URM 50% 86% %1 Gen 67% 100% *EFC = Estimated Family Contribution Through PEEPS, we intend to increase our institutional capacity by identifying effective tools and creating the infrastructure to effectively and efficiently improve the educational opportunities for disadvantaged students. A holistic approach was taken to consider the entire student experience from recruitment to graduation, and a variety of resources already established on campus were bundled together. In addition, PEEPS-specific activities were included, and these program components include: • Fall welcome back retreat • block scheduling of gateway engineering support courses with supplemental workshops • weekly scheduled study room and tutor • Engineering Success courses • quarterly advising with PEEPS Coordinator and faculty or engineering advisor • individualized coaching and mentoring of personal academic and professional goals • science/engineering outreach activities to local underserved K-6 schools • peer mentors • social events We track the use of resources (e.g., utilization of office hours, supplemental workshops, tutoring, advising, health and counseling services, career services, recreation center, participation in clubs, outreach, research, service learning opportunities) for each PEEPS student to identify the most useful interventions or combinations of interventions. The analysis can then assist future decisions for other student success programs. While we know that it is difficult to generalize our results, we also realize that learning about individual student experiences and qualitative data gathering is useful. Slaton and Pawley discuss the “power of small N” to explore how race and gender (and other categories) interact with engineering education institutions. We seek to move beyond a “deficit model” and embrace our student’s unique “funds of knowledge” and assist them in viewing their backgrounds and individual strengths as assets as engineers. Not only does this framework guide our scholarship program, but also the Engineering Success courses that have been developed through this grant. Our results are being used to inform other initiatives around campus as we work with other entities (such as another scholarship program and the Multicultural Engineering Program) to impact a greater number of students. Now in the 3 year of our 5-year grant, we wish to examine how our underlying paradigm of forming cohorts to support students may or may not be contributing to their academic and personal success in college. Not only is each of the S-STEM scholarship awardees a part of a PEEPS cohort, but they also have the PEEPS Support Team (i.e., Engineering Student Support staff, engineering faculty, AmeriCorps VISTA member, financial aid staff) available for assistance. We have multiple avenues of inquiry to the PEEPS experiences, such as quarterly check-ins (that are also individualized advising sessions), periodic reflections, and a end of the school year focus group. Therefore, while the PEEPS project enables the cohort members to take certain courses together, study with one another, and socialize together, do they really support each other academically and emotionally to make a difference? How do the PEEPS Support Team and PEEPS activities help students, if any? How can we take what we’ve been learning through the PEEPS project to impact other programs and infrastructure at our university?