| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
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| Initial Amendment Date: | June 7, 2016 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | June 7, 2016 |
| Award Number: | 1611732 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Sandra Richardson
srichard@nsf.gov (703)292-4657 DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | July 1, 2016 |
| End Date: | June 30, 2020 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $299,972.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $299,972.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
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| History of Investigator: |
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| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
100 N UNIVERSITY DR EDMOND OK US 73034-5207 (405)974-2538 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
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| Primary Place of Performance: |
OK US 73034-5209 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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| Parent UEI: |
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| NSF Program(s): |
IUSE, EPSCoR Co-Funding |
| Primary Program Source: |
04001617DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
| Program Reference Code(s): |
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| Program Element Code(s): |
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| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This project will fund a student statistical consulting group, called SCHOLAR (Statistical Consulting Help for Organizational Leaders and Academic Researchers). SCHOLAR will give students the opportunity to study statistics while participating in service learning or experiential education projects. It will be an academic year program, staffed by undergraduate students who will work collaboratively on interdisciplinary projects submitted by researchers at the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO) or organizations in the community. Up to 20 students will be directly involved with SCHOLAR each year and hundreds indirectly through high school recruiting visits and project dissemination. High school seniors and undergraduate students will be recruited from a variety of majors and will enter the program in their freshman or sophomore years. The goals of SCHOLAR are (1) to increase the number of undergraduate students majoring or minoring in statistics or mathematics, especially those from underrepresented groups in STEM (e.g. Native Americans and women) and first-generation low-income students; (2) to teach undergraduate students, through faculty and peer mentoring, how to conduct and report research, and to prepare students for careers or graduate study in STEM fields; (3) to contribute to the growing body of research concerning the effects of experiential statistics education on undergraduate students; and (4) to provide statistical consulting services to other faculty at UCO and the community at large.
SCHOLAR will significantly change the current methods of statistics instruction and research, especially with respect to the involvement of recent high school graduates and college underclassmen in experiential statistics education. It will also contribute to the renewed call for improvement in STEM education by providing undergraduate students access to real research and real data. SCHOLAR students will meet with clients as consultants, collect and analyze data, and provide written and oral summaries of their work. They will also be required to present each year at a local and/or national conference. Other SCHOLAR features include student mentoring by peers, faculty, and researchers; teaching opportunities through student-led seminars; and early exposure to a variety of research being conducted both on- and off-campus. The effects of SCHOLAR activities on students will be tracked and evaluated and the outcomes will be reported through publications and presentations at professional meetings. SCHOLAR will be a model program for the use of experiential education to teach statistics, especially at primarily undergraduate institutions. Future plans are to expand the SCHOLAR model to other institutions, and to branch out to incorporate other disciplines including mathematical biology, operations research, and high-performance computing.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
Students can listen to lectures on statistics, work problems from textbooks, and excel on exams, but they don’t truly LEARN anything until they DO it. At the University of Central Oklahoma (UCO), undergraduate students actively DO statistics and data science through an extracurricular student consulting group called SCHOLAR (Statistical Consulting Help for Organization Leaders and Academic Researchers). SCHOLAR students meet with their clients to develop research questions, collect and organize any necessary data, analyze the data, and prepare final reports for their clients.
In 2016, the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UCO was awarded an NSF IUSE grant to study the impacts of SCHOLAR on both students and clients. Since 2016, twenty students have participated in SCHOLAR. In selecting these students an effort was made to include students from underrepresented groups in STEM. Of the twenty students, 15 (75%) were female, 3 (15%) were black or African American, and 2 (10%) were Hispanic. Additionally, an attempt was made to recruit students early in their academic careers to allow them to participate in SCHOLAR for multiple years. Of the twenty students, 9 (45%) began participating in SCHOLAR as freshmen or sophomores. In all, the students completed fifteen consulting projects for real clients from fields as varied as Veterans Affairs, Forensic Science, and Linguistics, among others.
Throughout this project, data were collected from the SCHOLAR students concerning their attitudes toward statistics (as measured by the Survey of Attitudes Toward Statistics), undergraduate research (as measured by the Survey of Undergraduate Research Experiences), and graduate study (as measured by the Survey of Attitudes Toward Graduate Study). All students reported at least a small gain in a variety of benefits including tolerance for obstacles in the research process, understanding of how scientists work on real problems, skill in giving effective oral presentations, and readiness for more demanding research, to name a few. Of the twenty students, 11 (55%) increased their plans for graduate study after participating in SCHOLAR for at least one year. There was also an increasing trend in the students’ value of and interest in statistics, and a decreasing trend in the students’ views of the difficulty of statistics, the longer they participated in SCHOLAR.
The future of SCHOLAR at UCO is bright. A new interdisciplinary STEM building was recently constructed at UCO. In this building is a dedicated space for SCHOLAR. This space includes an area where students can meet with clients, both in-person and virtually, and an area where students can meet to work on their projects together. Plans are to continue the SCHOLAR program indefinitely.
Last Modified: 10/28/2020
Modified by: Tracy Morris
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