Catalyzing Change: Best Practices for Broadening Participation in STEM in the United States

The Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) is a major program initiated and supported by the US National Science Foundation for more than 33 years. It has been a primary force for broadening participation in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) in the United States. LSAMP has been of increasing the American STEM workforce by increasing the number of historically underrepresented students earning baccalaureate degrees and entering graduate programs in STEM disciplines. This goal is addressed through the formation of alliances of institutions of higher education from community colleges to major research universities. There are about 60 alliances including as many as 600 institutions. In addition to programming to aid students, established alliances research the impact of best practices on historically underrepresented students by conducting social science/educational studies.

The papers for this Research Topic will focus on LSAMP best practices to develop and support pathways to success and graduation in non-medical STEM disciplines for students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM. These pathways include all segments from pre-college through graduate school and any route of entrance. Areas of special interest will include recruitment, mentoring, research experiences, transitions between levels and novel approaches for retention. The goal is to compile a single source of quality, research based papers on the proven best practices for broadening participation in STEM. This volume is intended to especially capture research efforts encouraged by the 2021 compilation "New Developments Towards Diversity and Inclusion: A United States Perspective" to provide practitioners with the latest and most effective practices. These studies are intended to help guide and improve the success of current and aspiring broadening participation programs and efforts in the future. The two collections will serve as one-stop sources for these efforts.

The papers should focus on best practices, programs and collaborations to develop and support pathways to success and graduation for broadening participation in non-medical STEM. They can include any students from pre-college through graduate school. Topics of interest are recruitment, mentoring, research experiences, transitions, novel approaches for retention or any similar topic. The studies in this collection can be research studies with rigorous assessment, curriculum and design experiments or literature reviews/current opinions. The reviews/opinions should provide 1) views on current advances or 2) evaluations of current literature on current topics. The call will include an abstract proposal for each paper which will be evaluated. Authors will be encouraged to submit a full manuscript, given suggestions on revision or discouraged before preparing a full manuscript.

Please follow the directions for submissions to this Research Topic found at https://lsamp-nch.org/resources/publications/

The Institute for Diversity Science (IDS) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison provided funding to cover the article processing charges for some of the manuscripts submitted to this Research Topic. We hereby state that IDS has had no editorial involvement in articles featured in this collection, ensuring that all aspects of the Research Topic are assessed objectively, free from influence by the specific policies or opinions of IDS. Markus Brauer, the institute's executive director, had no editorial involvement in these articles. The other Topic Editors report no conflicts of interest related to this Research Topic.

Keywords: STEM, broadening participation, assessment, LSAMP, STEM pathways

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.