About

The First Year Retention & Equity in STEM at Hunter (FRESH) is a program funded by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program) of the National Science Foundation (“Achieving Equitable Persistence in STEM with a Data-informed Student-centered Transformation of the First-year College Experience” Award #2122762). This project involves collaboration between a working group of STEM faculty, STEM education researchers, and administrators that have the goal of arranging and deploying a set of innovative and scalable STEM success practices intended to transform first-year STEM education at Hunter, including gateway course revision, faculty pedagogical development, course-based research experiences, STEM-focused learning communities, STEM-readiness activities, and STEM-focused co-curricular support. The major goals of the project involve: Improving STEM Education, Achieving Equitable Student Success in STEM, Promoting Collaborative Research on STEM Education and Promoting Institutional Transformation.

GOALS & BROADER IMPACT

This project has four intended broader impacts:

1. Improve STEM Education

2. Achieve Equitable Student Success in STEM

3. Promote Collaborative Research on STEM Education

4. Promote Institutional Transformation to advance the understanding of the social and academic needs of Hispanic/Latinx STEM students

Our project team (the STEM Student Success Working Group, SSSWG) has identified two objectives for this project:

1. To deploy and empirically study a set of STEM student success strategies that are tailored to the students and conditions at Hunter with a focus on the biology, chemistry, and mathematics gateway courses and the first-year experience

2. To communicate project findings to key constituents at Hunter and iteratively implement the most effective policies and practices across Hunter College STEM departments and beyond