Mentoring Math Scholars for Success (M^2S^2)
By DUE Point Lead Editor, Audrey Malagon, Virginia Wesleyan University
Since they were hired together at California State University, Fresno, Carmen Caprau, Tamás Forgács, and Oscar Vega have chatted about ways to better support their students. They’ve worked on many projects together, and a few years ago decided to pursue an NSF S-STEM grant with mathematics education faculty member Jenna Tague (formerly of Fresno State, now at Clovis Community College) and Assistant to the Interim Provost Alam Hassan (Fresno State). Their project, Mentoring Math Scholars for Success (M2S2), was designed with the needs of their students in mind. It provides a path to four-year degree completion for students who may otherwise have faced financial or academic challenges that delayed graduation. By giving students a sense of belonging, early exposure to STEM courses, plenty of mentoring and support, and opportunities to engage in fun math activities, the project has helped students succeed. As the first cohort of scholars enters their senior year, PI Oscar Vega reflects on the program’s success and challenges.
1.Mentoring students to success is important in so many programs- what is it that sets your program apart from other programs with similar goals?
Our PI team is very hands-on and intentional in mentoring scholars. As faculty mentors, we hold office hours, provide tutoring, drive them to conferences, and facilitate program activities ourselves. We’re also involved in the recruiting and selection process, so we get to meet them early on.
We support students both academically and personally. For example, once a year, we bring somebody from the university student health center or counseling office to talk to students. We also talk about growth mindset and read and discuss books like Living Proof and Mathematics for Human Flourishing.
2. How did you decide on the specifics of the program, like the 18-credit STEM pathway?
We were aware of literature stating that early exposure to STEM coursework could create a solid foundation for our students and reduce attrition. We also knew that at Fresno State, many students are first generation college students and most mathematics majors graduate in 5-6 years due to having half-time or full-time jobs and providing for their families. We were aware of high attrition rates for students who were not “math ready” when they entered and gaps between students who enter with calculus credit versus those that start at Calculus I. The summer tutoring and extensive math content mentoring through their first year sets students up for four year graduation. By the end of their second year in the program, most scholars have taken more upper division mathematics coursework than their peers who started two courses ahead.
We’ve also noticed that the activities in our program promote a sense of belonging among students, between students and math faculty, and between students and mathematics. We have seen highly successful students leave the major because they do not feel this sense of belonging. Those that have been invited to join our program’s activities start to feel more connected and excel.
Really, most of what this program is focusing on has originated in us understanding the demographics of our students and building a scaffolded support structure around their needs in order to help them achieve their goals.
3. A key attribute of your program are the problem-solving challenges. Can you tell us more about those?
We believe that students need strong problem-solving skills to be able to survive in more advanced math courses and to eventually engage in undergraduate research or independent studies. In these challenge sessions we introduce a wide variety of problem types, such as lateral thinking puzzles — which the scholars loved!
We have intentionally avoided a competitive atmosphere. We want students to collaborate, be challenged and engaged in productive struggle, and have fun. They’ve even nicknamed these problem-solving sessions “Math Nerds At Work.” We’ve noticed that when the content is more challenging and scholars question why they need to study math at this level, making math fun helps them “get over the hump.”
We started with short problems they could solve during a meeting and gradually gave them harder problems that take one or two weeks to solve. When in groups, we saw evidence of older scholars helping younger ones. We consider this to be a good first step towards building research skills and capacity. In fact, about one third of the M2S2 scholars have engaged in research, taken an independent study, or plan to do so soon, a significantly larger percentage than non-M2S2 students.
4. What’s the biggest change/adjustment you’ve had to make?
We realized that some students do not seek out the help needed to fully benefit from the program support.. A theme throughout the data collected suggests this reluctance is connected to a student’s mathematical identity—in particular their sense of recognition as a math person and their belief about the nature of doing mathematics. Some students associate asking for help and having to struggle through challenging material as signals of not being good at math. For some of these students, this decrease in recognition is connected to other aspects of their identity outside of academics. Others feel a sense of dissonance when asked to engage in reasoning and proof and a different kind of math than they experienced in K-12. As a result, we’ve added more activities to foster a math growth mindset and made some supports mandatory (e.g. scholars must spend at least one hour a week in a faculty/TA office hour, or math at the tutoring lab).
Learn more about NSF DUE 1742236
Full Project Name:Mentoring Math Scholars for Success
Abstract: https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1742236
Project Contact: Dr. Oscar Vega, PI; ovega@csufresno.edu
*Responses in this blog were edited for length and clarity.