Fall 2016 Course

3 alumni from the pilot Spring 2016 course continued this semester, with Megan Lyster, assistant director for Center for Community Engagement at Amherst College, co-teaching the course. The major project we focused on this semester was creating different easy-to-implement workshop guides for professors to facilitate and assess the following questions:

1. What is diversity?
2. Why is diversity important in STEM?
3. What are the main challenges facing underrepresented students in STEM?
4. What's happening at your institution?
5. What are effective approaches of supporting students from all backgrounds?

This semester, we created workshop to address question #3, and piloted it in CHEM161, Chemical Principles, one of the gateway chemistry courses at Amherst College. The workshop guide can be found under the Resources tab.

Click on the tabs below to explore the methods, findings, and feedback from the pilot workshop.

• Methods
• Key Findings
• ​Feedback

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Pre-Class Activity

The goal of this pre-class activity was to identify the images of a STEM student at Amherst. Adopting from the Draw-a-Scientist test (Chambers 1983), we asked students to draw or describe a typical STEM student at Amherst. 

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In Class

Results are in the key findings tab.

Part 1: introduction

part 2: group formation

part 3: individual reflection

part 4: group discussion

part 5: elevator pitch (planned, but not conducted)

part 6: feedback & future directions

Pre-Class Activity Results: only 3 respondents, but common themes were:

1. Academic required of STEM students
2. Observations focused more on work habits/strategies
3. One respondent noted that STEM students do tend to group into categories based on major or intended career path
4. No mention of how ethnicity or other demographics are represented

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