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.

Ninth-grade biology students create cell models using clay.

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Broadening Participation in STEM Broadening Participation in STEM

Community Resources that Promote Mexican Origin Children's STEM Education across Diverse Families

Effective Years: 2018-2022

This project seeks to broaden the participation of an important underrepresented group in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Mexican-origin children, one of the fastest growing segments of the U.S. population, often come from disadvantaged circumstances that increase their need to use public education for social mobility while also posing challenges to navigating the public education system. Yet, Mexican-origin families are rich in social resources that can be leveraged to help children overcome obstacles in their educational paths. This project will identify critical points in the K-12 system and higher education when Mexican-origin children are at heightened vulnerability of leaving the STEM pipeline and community resources that promote their STEM persistence. Understanding the role that families and community resources play in Mexican-origin students' participation in STEM courses and careers is important for U.S. economic productivity and Mexican-origin children's economic success.

Organized around a conceptual model drawing from theories on life course, educational inequality, assimilation, cultural wealth, and community context, analyses will apply multilevel modeling to a new data source that integrates (1) the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten Cohort of 1998-99 (covering the elementary to middle school transition) and the Educational Longitudinal Study of 2002 (covering the high school to college transition) with (2) community resources data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, Institute of Museum & Library Services, Zip Business Patterns, and Bureau of Labor Statistics. This comprehensive data source will include a range of STEM outcomes at each pathway stage (test scores/gains, academic performance, course-taking, degree/certificate), community resources hypothesized to be supportive of Mexican-origin children's STEM education (nonprofit youth-serving or cultural organizations, libraries, businesses/labor market conditions), and measures of family context (SES, positive parenting). The merged databases will be available through the National Center of Education Statistics (NCES). The research team will also provide code written for statistical analyses upon request and permission from NCES. This project exemplifies the Education and Human Resources Core Research program's commitment to fundamental research on learning in STEM that combines theory, techniques, and perspectives from a wide range of disciplines and contexts. Further, by contributing to a cohesive, federated, national-scale approach to research data infrastructure, the project exemplifies NSF's larger aim of harnessing the data revolution.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.