Prairie State College, a community college located in the south suburbs of Chicago, received a Department of Education grant designed to increase the number of African American graduates in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields and to increase the number of African American students who successfully complete gateway math and science courses. To achieve these goals, we have focused on curricular and student service interventions. The curricular innovations include implementing Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL), peer tutoring, introducing more inquiry based experiments in the laboratory, and increasing opportunities to use instrumentation. Student service strategies include the hiring STEM specific advisers for the students, student participation in various workshops on study skills and time management, and encouraging students to engage in undergraduate research. This paper will focus on how these curricular and student service innovations intersect and provide preliminary data on the effectiveness of the interventions as well as discuss the strengths and weaknesses of this approach.

Implementing curricular innovations at a predominantly black community college: Triumphs and setbacks

246th National Meeting (2013)

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