Cameron Davidson, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Akshata Naik, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Deidre Hurse, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Kyeorda Kemp, Oakland University William Beaumont School of Medicine
Introduction
We must recruit and retain individuals in STEMM who are representative of the US demographics to continue supporting the workforce. Efforts to do so must start well before college and should occur in grades K-12. Therefore, we were interested in determining who is being recruited into STEMM-associated fields and surveying them about their experiences with various learning modalities associated with best practices in teaching adult learners.
Methods
We surveyed first-year college students who graduated from high school between September and October 2022 to investigate the relationship between participating in STEMM outreach and pathway programs (OPP) and self-directed learning (SDL). We recruited 339 respondents through Centiment LLC's data collection platform, as well as word-of-mouth and social media postings. All participants were screened to ensure their interest in STEM-related fields and recent graduation from a US high school. Correlation tests were conducted to determine if there was a relationship between the demographic factors collected and the number of pathway and outreach program experiences reported by students.
Results
We found that participation in AP/IB (effect size 0.365,p<0.001) and dual enrollment (effect size 0.468, p<0.001) was moderately to strongly associated with OPP experiences. In addition, being a first-generation college student (effect size 0.117, p =0.031) and gender (effect size 0.123, p= 0.024) were also correlated with involvement in OPP. Interestingly, race, ethnicity, area SES, and income did not correlate with the number of OPP experiences. We are currently analyzing data collected on the learning modalities that these students have experienced.
Conclusions
Many OPP programs aim to recruit and retain individuals from diverse backgrounds into their programs. This work indicates that the typical student in our sample was high-achieving. Interestingly, our preliminary findings suggest that the relationship between gender and first-generation status was weaker, while race, income, area SES, and ethnicity were not correlated with OPP experiences. These findings have implications for the work of the broader ASPBP audience.