“Capstone” Institutions Collaborate on Developing Programs to Improve STEM Success in a Liberal Arts Context

In 2012, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) awarded $50 million in grants to forty-seven small colleges and universities to recognize predominantly undergraduate institutions as incubators of new ideas and models that might be replicated by other institutions to improve how science is taught in college. Awards to eleven of the institutions that have been long-term recipients of HHMI funding with mature and successful programs were designated as "Capstone Awards."

HHMI charged Capstone Institutions* with identifying key elements that led to success. To meet this charge and associated goals of each institution, the Capstone Institutions have collaborated to compare program approaches, experiences, and activities to identify key strategies to improve and broaden access to undergraduate science education and to share efforts in a way that is as accessible and as useful as possible to other schools seeking reform to broaden access. This collaboration has revealed striking similarities in approaches taken by Capstone Institutions to improve science education, particularly in four specific areas:

• Developing Inquiry Skills: An inquiry-rich curriculum incorporates elements of research at any stage of student development. An inquiry-rich curriculum structure may be linear or iterative, but a key goal is to expose students to scientific problem-solving processes.
• Increasing Persistence of all Students in STEM: The Capstone institutions strive to achieve inclusion through an interlocking network of support, from increasing access to our institutions to supporting students once they arrive.
• Fostering Integrative or Interdisciplinary Learning:Training in science, engineering and mathematics content and skills is necessary, but not sufficient to prepare future leaders in STEM fields. Students must also gain experience in applying the knowledge and skills to complex, real world challenges. The role of integrative learning is to increase students' ability to transfer, apply and synthesize their classroom learning into coherent and usable knowledge.
  
• Pathways to Institutional Change: Despite the overwhelming similarity of approaches to science education, development and implementation is clearly dependent on institutional context.

The newly completed and released website features detailed information from each Capstone Institution about its programming via an institutional profile. In addition, a synthesis of lessons learned in each of the four areas has been constructed from the experiences of all the institutions.

The overarching goal in producing this web-based project is to support others aiming to adopt, adapt, or create similar programs, in an effort to improve higher education for all students. For more information on changes underway in higher education we recommend For Higher Ed: SERC's Portal to Resources for Faculty, Departments and Institutions.

*The eleven Capstone Institutions include three historically black colleges and universities (Morehouse, Spelman, and Xavier University of Louisiana) and five single-sex colleges (one men's college, Morehouse, and four women's colleges—Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Smith, and Spelman). Capstones are situated in locales ranging from large cities (Barnard, CUNY Hunter, Morehouse, Spelman, and Xavier) to suburbia (Bryn Mawr, Hope, Smith, and Swarthmore) and the rural Midwest (Carleton, Grinnell