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Examples of Assessment by Institution |
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Northwestern University: In 2001, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Northwestern a grant to enhance, evaluate, and refine a program designed to minimize the barriers many students face in the study of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The Gateway Science Workshop (GSW) program, as it is known, has since served more than 4,000 students in five disciplines, spawned a for-credit mentorship training program, consistently received exceptionally high reviews from diverse stakeholders, and repeatedly shown increases in course retention and grades among student participants.
Originally begun in 1997 as a small pilot program in Northwestern’s Biology department, the GSW program has grown dramatically over its lifetime. The program now serves some 700 students a year, many of whom participate in more than one workshop during the year. The program runs in conjunction with 9 course sequences in the five disciplines, with approximately 100 trained facilitators each running a group, and 17 “senior facilitators” (second-year facilitators who take on leadership responsibilities) helping coach facilitators and assisting with program logistics.
Administered through Northwestern’s Searle Center for Teaching Excellence, GSW has demonstrated success on a number of fronts. Student, facilitator, and faculty ratings of their own experience have been consistently high since GSW’s inception. Even more critical to the program’s mission are the encouraging retention and grade outcomes of student participants, particularly for underrepresented students. In Biology and Chemistry, for example, students participating between 2001 and 2005 on average received higher final grades than did non-participants, with even higher gains recorded among minority-group students. Further, majority-group students participating between 2001 and 2004 were 2.4 times more likely to be retained in the course sequence than were majority-group student who did not participate. And minority-group participants were 2.8 times more likely to be retained than were non-participating minority-group students.
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Northwestern University |
