Grant Title: California Challenges in STEM Energy Education
OPR Issued Grant Number: OPR18123
This project seeks to reduce large educational equity gaps in STEM fields that are experienced by Hispanic and other underrepresented minority (URM) students who live in California's Central Valley. The California State University at Bakersfield (CSU Bakersfield), the University of California at Merced (UC Merced), and Bakersfield College, three academic institutions that are located in the valley and serve these students, will participate in this demonstration project. These equity gaps exist despite strong demand for STEM graduates in the local economy, which is largely based upon the energy and agricultural industries. The hypothesis underlying the project is that URM students have a limited perspective of their possible contributions to improving technology due to social issues, such as knowing no one in their community who is a scientist or engineer. Furthermore, when URM students enter STEM fields, they fail to see the connection between their studies and real-world problems because gateway courses in current curricula fail to make that connection explicit. This project will introduce the concepts behind practical technical problems at the intersection of energy, water, and agriculture, problems relevant to the Central Valley, into gateway STEM courses. At CSUB and BC, this will be accomplished via a novel combination of two pedagogies, flipped classroom and Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL), which we call Flipped Classroom-Enhanced-Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (FC-E-POGIL). The flipped classroom format involves pre-class student reading assignments and the enhanced POGIL format involves a highly structured in-class format, including assigned student roles and after class homework assignments. At UC Merced a new course is being developed via Flipped classroom and real-world applications in the Human-Centered Research and Design course. Through these interventions, we anticipate that student attitudes to learning STEM content, student success rates in specific lessons and final passing rates, as well as equity gaps in student attitudes will increase.
This work is funded by the California Educational Learning Lab from the California Governor's Office of Planning and Research