Cultivating a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) community for two-year college student success and persistence

PLOS ONE RESEARCH ARTICLE Cultivating a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) community for twoyear college student success and persistence Deann Leoni ID1☯*, Tom Fleming2☯, Jenny L. McFarland ID3☯ 1 Mathematics Department, Edmonds College, Lynnwood, Washington, United States of America, 2 Physics Department, Edmonds College, Lynnwood, Washington, United States of America, 3 Biology Department, Edmonds College, Lynnwood, Washington, United States of America a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. * Abstract OPEN ACCESS Citation: Leoni D, Fleming T, McFarland JL (2023) Cultivating a Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) community for two-year college student success and persistence. PLoS ONE 18(9): e0290958. https://doi.org/10.1371/ journal.pone.0290958 Editor: Bing Hiong Ngu, University of New England, AUSTRALIA Received: September 16, 2022 Accepted: August 18, 2023 Published: September 8, 2023 Copyright: © 2023 Leoni et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper and the Supporting Information files. Undergraduate students studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) often fail to persist in critical “gateway” courses, resulting in students leaving the STEM pathway. Community college students leave STEM pathways at higher rates than students at universities. Implementation of a program designed to engage community college STEM students and faculty in a community of support was associated with increased persistence in STEM gateway courses and associate degree completion. Program elements included support staff, a STEM study room with peer tutors, faculty advisors, and transfer assistance. Over seven years, 415 students joined this opt-in support program. The majority of students in this program were economically disadvantaged and many were nontraditional college students. Using institutional data we tested the hypothesis that participation in this program was associated with increased student success and persistence in STEM courses and at the college. The mean GPA for students in the program in the ten courses with the highest STEM enrollments was higher (2.89) than that for other students (2.76). Quarter-to-quarter persistence was 87% for program students compared to 67% for non-program students in a matched student population. In STEM gateway courses, program students had between 1.2x to 3.5x greater likelihood than non-program students of progressing to precalculus-2 controlling for first-attempt GPA in precalculus-1. Similar persistence patterns were observed for other gateway STEM courses. Observed persistence for students in the program was higher than comparable groups of students, including persistence for those who experienced early failure in STEM courses. These data suggest students should be supported through early failure to enable persistence in critical STEM sequences, especially in gateway Math and Chemistry courses. Funding: This work was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation, NSF DUE 1068399. Some students were also supported through scholarships by NSF S-STEM grant NSF DUE 1060590. There was no additional external funding received for this study. Introduction Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. In the past decade, between 33 and 40 percent of U.S. undergraduates were enrolled at community (two-year) colleges. These institutions will continue to provide an important PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0290958 September 8, 2023 1 / 22 PLOS ONE Cultivating community college STEM student success & persistence foundation for students earning degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) [1,2] despite declining community college enrollments [3]. Community colleges typically enroll a higher percentage of non-traditional students (older than 22) and students from historically marginalized communities than four-year institutions, and they can play a pivotal role in increasing the diversity of the STEM workplace [4]. However, the large population of students at community colleges has often been ignored in critical conversations about STEM education, workforce shortages, and economic challenges [5,6]. National discourse, research, and funding in higher education for STEM is predominantly centered on four-year institutions. As more STEM majors and a more diverse workforce are required to fulfill 21st-century challenges, more research is needed to understand this important portion of the undergraduate population [7,8]. An important role of public community colleges is to provide equitable access to higher education [9]. Community colleges provide open access to higher education regardless of secondary education grades or test scores. Two-year colleges enroll students who are economically disadvantaged, attended high schools with limited STEM resources [10], and are more likely to be historically excluded in STEM [11]. Community colleges’ relatively low tuition and fees and regional locations allow students to live at home and continue to work [12] and thus provide an important foundation and pathway for students who want to earn STEM degrees [6,13–15]. CC student persistence Although there is substantial student interest in STEM careers, U.S. college students continue to leave STEM fields at high rates. Fewer than half of first-year undergraduate students who start at a college or university in a STEM field graduate with a bachelor’s degree in STEM six years later [16]. Attrition rates of community college students tend to be substantially higher than students at four-year universities [17,18]. Although there are many potential reasons for these lower persistence rates, research has shown that implementation of high-impact practices and a range of opportunities focused on STEM student success may increase student retention and academic success of historically marginalized populations [19] and influence community college transfers’ STEM degree attainment [20,21]. Introductory science and mathematics ‘gateway’ courses, including general chemistry and calculus, prepare students for future STEM courses but can also act as barriers to persistence in STEM pathways [13,22,23]. STEM-interested college students are often ‘weeded out’ or lose academic momentum as they attempt to complete prerequisite gateway courses in chemistry [24] and mathematics [25], and disadvantaged or underrepresented students are more likely to be impacted by these barriers. Loss of academic momentum, the rate at which students earn credits particularly in their initial terms, may decrease the prob (...truncated)