The Road to Strengthening Two-year Hispanic-Serving Institution Participation in the NSF ATE Funding Program

HSI ATE Hub is a three-year collaborative research project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) that joins two successful programs. Mentor-Connect mentors 2-year college faculty to develop competitive proposals for the NSF Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program, and KickStarter facilitates strategic STEM assessment and planning to drive competitive STEM proposal development at 2-year Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSIs). The goal of HSI ATE Hub is to build capacity and leadership at 2-year HSIs for developing competitive ATE proposals to elevate 2-year HSIs as drivers of their community's economic success via technician education. Data sets from three annual HSI ATE Hub Cohorts, four prior KickStarter Cohorts, and nine Mentor-Connect Cohorts have been aggregated to assess the following research questions about 2-year HSIs: 1. Are there unique opportunities/barriers/challenges related to STEM program development and grant-writing endeavors for advanced technological education? 2. How do we build capacity to pursue the opportunities and address the barriers/challenges? 3. How do mentoring efforts/styles related to STEM program development and grant-writing need to differ for HSI faculty? 4. What types of resources are relevant to the HSI ATE Community? This third paper in a series will report new data and incremental results from Year 3 of the HSI ATE Hub and a summary of results from the prior two years [1] [2]. These results include interactions with the HSI ATE community through intentional, expanded engagement to enhance learning from Latinx Advisory Council members and training webinars to develop educators' acumen of culturally responsive instruction and high impact practices. Feedback from interviews and surveys with faculty at 2-year HSIs in HSI ATE Hub Cohorts 1-3 will be discussed to address research questions 1, 2, and 3. Evolved staging of resources relevant to the HSI ATE Community and related research directions for extending the project will address research question 4.