ALRISE is a five-year, $10 million cooperative agreement with the Eddie Bernice Johnson National Science Foundation INCLUDES Alliance to Accelerate Latinx Representation in STEM Education (ALRISE) with Institutional Intentionality and Capacity Building for Experiential Learning.
We are building a framework for a networked improvement community that will systematically change higher education institutions to become student serving toward broadening participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM).
We aim to increase Latinx student retention and completion in STEM at two- and four-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs) and emerging HSIs (eHSIs) through culturally responsive undergraduate research and work-based experiences. We also seek to improve self-reported STEM identity and engagement from these students.
ALRISE Alliance goals
• Improve cultural responsiveness and intentionality among educators through curriculum and professional development that infuse work-based and undergraduate research experiences with culturally responsive strategies.
• Build institutional capacity for effective experiential learning programs to improve Latinx STEM student engagement by leveraging institutional-based STEM Planning Teams and Boundary Brokers, and implementing Alliance-wide partnerships and processes.
• Demonstrate institutional intentionality to serve Latinx students using a continuous improvement approach with data collected through iterations of the STEM-ESS Framework.
The Alliance aims to realize shifts in systems that address these broadening participation opportunities:
• Enable campus environments to be intentional and culturally-responsive to Latinx STEM students, but not to the exclusion of others.
• Place the necessity to change on institutions and educators to harness Latinx students’ assets, strengths and resilience and create an environment that fosters reproducible success.
• Mend the leaky pipeline where Latinx STEM retention and completion rates are significantly lower than enrollment.
• Maximize the current representation of Hispanics in STEM job clusters which is at a low 7% (1.2M) of employed adults in STEM jobs (17.3M) as compared to 16% (21M) of all employed adults (131M) (Pew Research Center, 2018).
• Increase the number of studies that are currently limited in STEM research on innovative pipelines for underrepresented students.
This collaborative project with NSF is also a research study. Data will be collected and analyzed at the student, institutional, and experiential learning program levels to provide evidence for practices supported by the ALRISE Alliance.
The following new knowledge (Intellectual Merit) is intended to be generated through this study:
• Culturally responsive practices with experiential learning programs that positively impact student outcomes;
• Professional development, tools, and resources that infuse intentionality into experiential learning programs;
• The Alliance design and infrastructure mobilizes change;
• A model and theory of improvement that accomplishes intentional acceleration and scale of Latinx representation in STEM.
Project success will be demonstrated by the following high-level outcomes:
• The Alliance is sustainable and effectively operationalized across all members and partners;
• Increased educator self-efficacy, confidence and effectiveness in culturally responsive practices in experiential learning;
• Institutional capacity improves Latinx STEM student engagement;
• Increased student self-efficacy, retention, completion, transfer and knowledge of critical workforce skills;
• Leadership strategies are intentional and lead to shifts in organizational culture to serve Latinx students in STEM.
