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S-STEM Organizational Partnerships Research Hub

The objective of the S-STEM Organizational Partnerships Research Hub is to advance understanding of organizational partnerships that support academic pathways for domestic low-income engineering students. Partnerships across the education system are essential for improving STEM; achieving the systematic, structural, or sustainable change desired by the S-STEM program is seldom achieved by individual isolated units and often requires partnerships across silos within an academic institution (intra-institution partnerships) and across institutions (inter-institution partnerships). This Hub has built a network of participating S-STEM programs across the nation to form a community of practice among current and past S-STEM grant holders that focuses on understanding the key organizational structures and nature of collaborative processes that advances the theory and practice of systematically supporting low-income engineering, computer science, and computing students in sustainable ways across a wide range of institutional and disciplinary contexts.

Highlighted Impacts and Outcomes

  • Developed a community of practice and research accelerator program which includes a wide range of 20+ partnering colleges and universities. This group includes private institutions, large research institutions, minority-serving institutions, community colleges, and regionally focused institutions.

  • Hosted two Summer Institutes (2024 at Loudon Campu of Northern Virginia Community College; 2023 at Virginia Tech) which brought together all the S-STEM accelerator grant teams and leadership teams to brainstorm, collaborate, share insights, and plan the next period of work.  

  • Created openly hosted research briefs Systematic Literature Review and Understanding Credit Mobility for Engineering Transfer Students

  • In addition to the citable scholarship below, presented at the Association for the Study of Higher Education 2024 Conference and the Council for the Study of Community Colleges 2024 Conference

Lee, W. C., Knight, D. B., Rodriguez, S., Austin, S. J., Sturgess, J. R., Klopfer, M. D., Grohs, J. R., Richardson, A., Grote, D., & Newcomer, J. N. (2024, February 25). S-STEM Partnerships Supporting Low-Income Engineering Students: A Descriptive Case Study. 2024 Collaborative Network for Engineering & Computing Diversity (CoNECD). https://peer.asee.org/s-stem-partnerships-supporting-low-income-engineering-students-a-descriptive-case-study

Grote, D. M., Richardson, A. J., Lee, W. C., Knight, D. B., Hill, K., Glisson, H., & Watford, B. A. (2024). Lost in translation: Information asymmetry as a barrier to accrual of transfer student capital. Community College Review, 52(1), 3-29. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/00915521231201208

Knight, D., Watford, B., Lee, W., Grohs, J., Reed, T., Imbrie, P. K., Grote, D., Richardson, A., Klopfer, M., Johnson Austin, S., & Berhane, B. (2023). Board 354: Organizational Partnerships S-STEM Research Hub. 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings, 42992. https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2–42992

Student Dissertations

Two current PhD students are using data from this project as part of their dissertation work. Once completed and available online, the links to student dissertations will be added.

In the news

Funding Sources

National Science Foundation

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. DUE-2138188. Any opinions, findings, interpretations, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of its authors and do not represent the views of the National Science Foundation.

Collaborative Research: A Research Hub for Understanding Inter- and intra-institutional partnerships that systematically support low-income engineering students $2,399,501, (2022-Present)

Research Collaborators on the Hub

Leadership Team

Virginia Tech Leadership: David Knight, (PI), Walter Lee (co-PI), Bevlee Watford (co-PI), Sarah Rodriguez (co-PI), Jake Grohs (co-PI), Amy Richardson, Gary Kirk, James Newcomer, Michelle Klopfer, Benjamin Chaback, Anya Work 

Representative Departments

Engineering Education, Center for Educational Networks and Impacts, Career and Professional Development

Collaborating Researchers on Leadership Team from outside Virginia Tech

Dustin Grote - PI at Weber State University

Hamadi Belghith - PI at Northern Virginia Community College 

Teri Reed - University of Oklahoma

P.K. Imbrie - University of Oklahoma

David Reeping - PI at University of Cincinnati 

Burk Berhane - Evaluator, at Florida International University 

Participating Institutions within the Hub Community of Practice

Partner Institutions

Barry University, Cal Poly, Central Connecticut State University, College of Lake County, Fordham University, Grand Valley State University, Moreno Valley College, Penn State Berks, Penn State, Savannah State University, Tennessee State University, Texas A&M - San Antonio; University of Detroit Mercy, University of Louisiana, Lafayette;  University of Louisville, University of Maryland, Baltimore County; University of Missouri, University of North Carolina, Charlotte; University of South Florida, University of Washington - Tacoma, West Virginia University Institute of Technology