My name is Dr. Chelsea LeNoble, and along with my Co-PI's Dr. Kristin Horan and Dr. Mindy Shoss, I welcome you to our STEM for All Video page! I hope everyone who visits our page is doing well and having a nice week.

Our project began in May of 2020, and our final wave of data collection is currently underway. We are examining the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on undergraduate faculty and students across the country from an organizational science and occupational health perspective. 

To all who view our video, we encourage you to think about the resources that may or may not have been available at your institution when the pandemic began and how that may have changed over time. We look forward to your questions, comments, and discussion. 

If you would like to see updates as we continue to conduct analyses and identify best practices, you're welcome to check out our Facebook page and/or our study website. You can reach us via email as well! 

Thank you,

Chelsea, Kristin, & Mindy

This is really fascinating...where will it be published?  I'd really like to share this information with colleagues.

What are best practices that higher ed adopt and adapt?

What have you learned that we can reccommend to administrators and faculty?

Thank you for sharing this important work.  As the Special Assistant to the President for COVID19 Recovery, I am intimately involved in discussions regarding curriculum changes and student impact.  I would love to see have we can collaborate in the future.

Kudos,

Crystal M. James, JD, MPH

As the mother of a child who spent their last quarter of college, as they and their friends put it, attending Zoom University, this hits home. I wonder what the impact of graduating during COVID has had on the career plans and paths of STEM students. Do graduating students make up part of your surveys?

In our own project (#1984), we have tried to mix teaching about data science and epidemiology with opportunities for kids (we're working with grades 4-8 in afterschool) to process their own uncertainties and frustrations and put them in a historical and global perspective. But we're not doing so through literature and discussion, not from an institutional perspective. We're trying to empower kids to be able to access and consider their own up-to-date information. We'll see how it goes--early pilot kids found themselves on the whole less anxious about the pandemic.

I am so glad that you have a presentation in this showcase! Our Rapid grant complements your project. For the last four years we have been studying the trajectories of nearly 500 youth who had in-depth mentored science research experiences when they were in high school. In documenting their trajectories longitudinally, we are looking at the obstacles they face as they pursue their majors, with 75% planning on STEM majors, and the opportunities and resources they leverage to support persistence. When the pandemic hit, the Rapid Grant we received allows us to continue documenting these same youth as they went through college. With very similar research questions to yours, we are gathering data on the types of resources college youth have access to, the types of significant adults and peers they are using and where they need more supports. Your findings align with our emerging findings - we are 8 months into the project. We will connect with you offline because we are about to start the next phase of our study which is focused on the significant adults and it be good if we can build off of your existing findings! The mid-year report for our Rapid grant can be found here: https://www.amnh.org/learn-teach/evaluation-res...

Our showcase video is here: https://stemforall2021.videohall.com/presentations/2149

Thank you for sharing this work! Throughout the pandemic I kept asking myself whether and how pandemic experiences, responses, and planning were being captured and analyzed so that we can hopefully learn from this vast social experiment in ways that will help us better confront disasters in the future, which are inevitable. I'm also pleased to see from this discussion thread that others are also undertaking different aspects of this critical research.

Could you please say more about how you define self-efficacy? I've been wondering whether affording students some level of decision-making, especially during this pandemic, is preferable to having institutions provide mostly top-down support. For example, we're now reading about the political battles that are about to ensue, especially at public state universities, about whether those institutions will require students to be vaccinated before they can return to campus. Telling people that they have to do something (or, in some cases, don't have to do something like getting the vaccine) vs. educating them in ways that lead them to make more informed decisions about such matters is an interesting conundrum. I've long been a proponent for teaching STEM subjects in ways that will allow students to understand that knowledge and understanding of these fields is personally empowering, but too often they are not taught with that kind of conceptual framework in mind. Do your think that your research will be able to help institutions focus on approaches to teaching and learning in addition to the other kinds of institutional support that they have provided students during the pandemic?

This is a very useful and instructive presentation.  Thank you very much for sharing it and your findings.  I think it helps people situate their interpretation of their own experiences and feelings in addition to those with whom they work.

Would you be able to share your sample size and how many different institutions participated in the study? Were you able to distinguish between race/gender or other demographics?

Really important work you're doing that I could see being expanded/applicable to other grade levels. Did you collect data from students who graduated from high school and entered college during the pandemic? I'm curious to see how those students managed such a big transition and what resources helped them during this process.

This is fascinating work. Look forward to seeing the results. One of the questions I've pondered is which changes institutions, faculty, and students make because of the pandemic will be continued post-pandemic because of the value of the changes. Have you seen any changes that you think will continue?

Thanks!  Judy

 Thank you for sharing this amazing work related to student self-efficacy. I would like to collaborate and discover more about your findings on best practices.

 Hello Dr. LeNoble and team! Thanks for sharing your fascinating research. I completed my undergraduate education just a few months before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US, but I've spent a lot of timing wondering what the experience must've been like for my friends and peers still pursuing their degrees. After speaking with many of them, they stressed the noticeable negative impacts it had on their mental health. What types of mental health support resources did students attributed to their increased self-efficacy?

Thank you for this important work. We know that STEM courses are also often accompanied by hands on labs and that many students find their passion in the applied work. This was disrupted for many students; do you have any sense as to how the loss of labs and in person summer research experiences is impacting students identity as scientists?

Great work! I love your emphasis on social context on educational outcomes. 

This is such important work. Putting into context what resources and what responses helped students to stay dedicated to STEM during these uncertain times will have a significant impact for next year when we go back and to in-person transitions and have a different type of uncertainty of hybrid/vaccinated/what does new normal look like/and/or for other future trauma-related situations. This will really give us critical feedback on what worked. 

I also thought the note where you commented that you had the participants "upload a message that their institution sent out that was particularly impactful, and we'll be linking different components of these uploaded messages to survey responses. This will allow us to look a bit closer at the way institutions' decisions around COVID-19 (and communication of those decisions) affect teaching and learning." was an excellent point of data to collect. I wonder if the timing on some of these messages might be a factor too. Not just the content? I'd be curious to see if students had more or less time in "atypical" university college contexts shifted needs. For example, I wonder if this year's students who have been exposed longer to the events started needing different resources or messages, or is it more of the same type?

We used exit interviews on our students and asked similar self-efficacy style questions. (Our study was originally focused on Noyce STEM scholars who were receiving extra PD training to adapt instruction to help support CLD students.) In our studies case, we asked during exit interviews how they felt COVID had impacted their preparedness and feelings of self-efficacy, as well as, how it might have helped them learn new technologies or methods. 

I would be very interested to see what the outcome on your study is. Besides what resources had the greatest impact. I would love to be kept posted on your findings. If you have a mailing list on please include me; cathy.lussier@ucr.edu