ECR Projects

Explore past and current fundamental STEM education research projects across the three research areas that NSF's EDU Core Research (ECR) program funds, as well as across ECR funding types. Other search filters draw from both NSF's data and the ECR Hub's hand coding of award abstracts.

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Understanding Community College Transfer Students' STEM Choice, Performance, Persistence, and STEM Baccalaureate Degree Attainment: A Typological Analysis

Effective Years: 2017-2024

The ECR (Education and Human Resources Core Research) program emphasizes fundamental STEM education research that will generate foundational knowledge in the field. As transfer students continue to use community colleges as stepping stones to pursue STEM degrees, it is important to understand the unique challenges these students encounter and the diversity within this important student population. This study will develop a transfer student typology and investigate its relationships with transfer students' STEM choice, performance, persistence, and STEM degree attainment. As one of the first efforts to develop such a typology on an important, yet frequently ignored student population in STEM education, the research will advance knowledge by building better connections between transfer typology and educational outcomes and college experiences. This step will be critical to identifying what significantly different subgroups of transfer students demonstrate different patterns in achieving STEM success. This information will help higher education institutions allocate resources more effectively and efficiently to tailor interventions to each of the transfer subgroups. This approach will provide a more holistic understanding of transfer students' pathways to STEM success and nuanced differences between each of the transfer subpopulations.

Data will be collected through a mixed-method approach to understand the extent to which community college transfer students vary based on their beliefs, goals, and behaviors. Quantitative methods will be used to identify the specific typology groups existing in community college transfer students. The project will then investigate the relationships between transfer typology reference groups and students' STEM choice, performance, persistence, and completion of STEM baccalaureate degrees. A series of in-depth qualitative interviews with students in each reference group will provide a deeper understanding of unique challenges that transfer students experience. The interviews will also uncover how these students navigate their ways to college and STEM education, what strategies they have applied, and what policies and practices should be developed to best facilitate transfers of each group to achieve academic success. Outcomes from this research study will offer researchers, faculty members, administrators, and policymakers in higher education meaningful insights into the diversity and complexity of the transfer student population. More importantly, this project takes a step further to build connections between the transfer typology and educational outcomes and college experiences for each of the transfer reference groups, and thus it can lead to development and implication of tailored support for transfer students. The findings can also suggest effective intervention and prevention programs that help transfer students avoid taking missteps and wrong turns as they progress to obtaining baccalaureate degrees in STEM fields of study, transforming access into success for transfer students.