Many Undergraduate Research Experiences take high achieving students who already have a strong interest in the discipline with the goal of developing their research skills so they will continue to graduate school and STEM careers. These students are often highly motivated and would achieve success without the program. Many more students could benefit from active mentoring in research, those from outside the discipline and those that may be lower achieving. This pilot study assesses changes in academic achievement and long terms career goals for three groups of students, high achieving student majoring in their research field (HA), lower achieving or students whose major is not science based (LA), and a control group of environmental science majors that are not involved a research mentoring (C). This is a post hoc study based on thirty students enrolled in the programs during the 2014/15/16 years. Students all attended Alabama A&M University, a Land Grant HBCU, and were primarily from the Department of Biological and Environmental Science. Assessment of academic success was measured through change in GPA.
Results/Conclusions
Overall GPA was 2.8 ±0.7, High Achieving GPA was 3.2 ±0.4, Low Achieving was 2.7 ±0.8, Control was 2.8 ±0.7. GPA was measured for two years, before and after mentoring. High Achieving student’s GPA dropped by an average of 0.2, Low Achieving GPA did not change and the Control group dropped by 0.4. Shifts in goals were assessed through a voluntary questionnaire. Overall both groups that were mentored showed strong interest in continuing in STEM fields, many of the students who were not mentored were considering changes in majors. Mentoring encourages students to continue in STEM and improves academic success however this preliminary study show great value in mentoring lower achieving students.