The Spartan Persistence Project (SPP)

1. The Spartan Persistence Project (SPP) Matthew A. Diemer, Kristen Bieda, Susan Blanshan, Joseph Cesario, Melanie Cooper, M. Brent Donnellan, Julie Lindquist, Jason Moser, Barbara Schneider, Matthew Wawrzynski Michigan State University Developmentment and Piloting SPP SPP Field Experiment: SU 14 Background • Public concern with the cost, time to degree, and payoffs of college increasingly salient (Keller, 2012). • These concerns magnified for underrepresented (first generation, poor and working class, African American, Native American, and Latino/a) students, who: • Are less likely to persist (Diemer & Li, 2012), • Demonstrate poorer academic achievement (Terenzini, Cabrera & Bernal, 2001), • Tend to attain degrees from less selective 4-year institutions (Adelman, 1999). • These concerns exacerbated in STEM fields (Riegle-Crumb & King, 2010). • These national concerns hold true at MSU, per institutional data and our consultation with multiple campus stakeholders • Particular concern with performance in ‘bottleneck’ STEM courses • SPP customized by interdisciplinary group, working in close collaboration with campus administration (e.g., Provost, Vice Provost for Undergraduate Studies, Registrar’s Office), and external experts. • Customization: piloting and focus groups regarding ‘belongingness’ intervention (described further below) • Pilot intervention delivered as part of AOP • Field experiment w/ full randomization, all incoming SP students • Qualtrics platform, students authenticate w/ NetID • January pilot, N = 541, 97% response rate • Team accessing behavioral data (‘card swipes’) & academic records to evaluate impact over time Previous Findings Mechanism(s) of Effects Outcome • Key design principles: • Deception • ‘Saying is believing’ • ‘Making the beneficiaries believe they are benefactors’ • Enabling ‘virtuous cycles’ • Previous social psychological treatments: • Mindset, belonging, purpose • Using the metaphor of a plane taxiing on a runway, many students just need ‘a little lift under the wings’ to take off and flourish during college – a lift that is provided by carefully designed social psychological interventions (D. Yeager, personal communication, October 14, 2013) • Primary outcomes: persistence, academic achievement [transcripts] • Secondary outcomes: STEM coursetaking patterns, STEM achievement • Mediators of interest: Behavioral connection to university (measured via card swipe data) • Unobtrusive mediators important measures, to avoid ‘contaminating’ subtle social psychological interventions that rely on deception • Moderators of interest: ACT, race/ethnicity, gender • Significance of these outcomes • Replicating work at institutions with higher per-pupil spending than MSU • Extending previous work to larger and more ‘at-risk’ student population • Fine-grained examination of STEM outcomes among underrep. students • Particularly important to identify motivational factors that predict success in remedial (MTH 1825) and ‘bottleneck’ STEM courses (MTH 103, CHEM 141) here & elsewhere • Social psychological interventions – often delivered online, in as little as 45 minutes - powerful and durable effects on: • academic achievement (Cohen, Garcia, Apfel & Master, 2011) • credit accrual (Yeager, Paunesko, Walton & Dweck, 2013) • sense of belonging at one’s university (Yeager & Walton, 2011) • beliefs about academic ability (Yeager et al., 2013) • Particularly impactful for underrepresented students (Yeager & Walton, 2011). • 63% reduction of credit accrual gap btw White vs African American students in 1st year at UT-Austin [Yeager et al. 2013] • .24 grade point improvement from sophomore to senior year for African American students at Stanford (Walton & Cohen, 2011) • A 52% reduction in the achievement gap btw White & African American students • .26 to .34 grade point improvement (on 4 point scale) among African American 7th graders [Cohen et al., 2006] • A 40% reduction in achievement gap