To share questions or comments, please contact John Loughman, NSF Grant Administrator or Julie Ambrose, Grant Research and Evaluation Specialist.
Outcomes
The Pathway to Achievement for STEM Scholars (PASS) program, known on campus as the STEM Scholars program, has met or exceeded each of the project goals. Details about the results and the annual report are available on the Project Goals and Results page. Here we describe some of what we learned along the way, and outcomes that may provide useful insights to other programmers and researchers.
Students Value Reflection
The scholars have completed a Likert-scale survey that revealed a variety of positive outcomes from the S-STEM program, most notably that “100% of participants would recommend this Scholarship program to other students” as indicated in student surveys conducted at the end of each semester.
Students rated the usefulness of the Reflection strategy equal to or higher than the rating of the benefit of the scholarship money every semester.
This leads us to recognize the strong benefit of the reflective piece of our structured program.
Students Want to Know "What's in it for me?"
Students cite the benefits of ePortfolio use
in the STEM Scholars program
Students are busy.
They come to community college for an education while balancing jobs, family, and other obligations. Why would they opt to invest time and effort on an ePortfolio, something LCCC didn’t even offer three years ago? In order to get buy in from students, we need to show them what's in it for them.
We learned what students find to be valuable, in part, by polling students each semester.
Students identified a variety of personal benefits including, ”Creating an ePort-folio improved my communication skills by teaching me to focus on the quality of information rather than just quantity of information I was providing visitors to my site.” During a tough semester, one student said, “Seeing my work build up helped build my self-esteem. With all of it in one place I could see how much I’ve actually done.”
A job seeking student adds, “I am listing the URL of my ePortfolio to my resume and I think that is helping me stand apart from other job applicants because I look more professional and motivated.” Even more fundamentally, one student said, “This might sound weird but it helped me find the real me. Being able to see what I am doing made me appreciate myself more as a person.”
Benefits depend on the structure of the program in which portfolios are embedded, participants’ level of engagement, and other factors. At LCCC, students consistently report being better able to understand and articulate their own goals and ways that their educational experiences relate to their goals after using the ePortfolio.
Student's Identified these Benefits
Students reported the following benefits of having created an ePortfolio (shown in order by the percent of respondents who identified each outcome):
- Think about my future.
- Describe myself, my goals, or my skills to others.
- Clarify my goals.
- Be more aware of my activities this semester.
- Prepare a resume.
- Appreciate what I have accomplished so far.
- Recognize how much I have learned so far.
- See how my activities and courses relate to my future.
- Realize that I should be doing more.
- Prepare for an interview.
- Show my faculty, family, friends or others what I have done.
- Prepare for job applications.
- See how I am similar to my peers in the program.
- See how I am different from my peers in the program.
- Improve my writing skills.
- Develop my computer skills.
- Prepare for my transfer applications.
By incorporating the use of ePortfolios into the STEM Scholars program it became even more clear to us that students benefit in different ways from the various aspects of the program. And, while the portfolio is designed to serve as an online repository that can be developed into a showcase website to enhance and promote a student's brand, there were numerous additional benefits. These are graphed above as a percent of 98 STEM Scholars who responded to this survey question over the four semesters from Fal 2013 through Spring 2015.
Faculty also ask, "What's in it for Me?"
Adapting a course to include new teaching strategies, new technologies and new student assignments requires a commitment of time and effort. LCCC faculty who have embraced the use of ePortfolios as part of their pedagogy identified the following benefits:
- The ePortfolio provides structure, and can be used as a basis for future decisions.
- Assignments can be stored as a finished product, or as a project in the works to be edited.
- The ePortfolio provides mentors, advisors, faculty an opportunity to review work as it is being done.
Students were Unaware of the Connection between Employability Skills and Work Integrated Learning
By incorporating the following rubric to student activity and learning outcomes pages, we were able to clearly see that students were not recognizing that they were gaining experience and skills; making the connection between classroom or laboratory learning and recognizing that their experiences were building skills needed in the workplace - work integrated learning needed to be made explicit to students -
This caused a shift in the focus of the STEM Scholars program in Spring 2016 from the PI maintaining students' engagement/activity lists and matching the activities with the learning outcomes to students making those connections as part of their guided reflection.
There are 6 STEM Scholars Learning Outcomes. This rubric simply assesses whether the students indicated progress toward growth/mastery of the outcomes on their final Activity List submission for the semester. This information was used for monitoring student awareness in ownership of the learning outcomes, as well as, National Science Foundation reporting.
No Evidence of Growth in this Area (0 points) | Yes, Evidence of Growth in this Area (1 point) | Points | |
Academic Success | |||
Career / Major Exploration | |||
Gaining Experience & Skills | XXXXX | ||
Mentoring | |||
Professional Development & Wellness | |||
Professionalism |
To share questions or comments, please contact John Loughman, NSF Grant Administrator or Julie Ambrose, Grant Research and Evaluation Specialist.