In the 1990s, the Foundation supported a project by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Mark Connolly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to conduct extensive ethnographies of students at seven selective colleges and universities to determine why majors in STEM fields switch majors for other areas. The results of their work, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, provides one of the most interesting, comprehensive accounts of what factors drive retention and attrition among undergraduates in STEM fields. Fifteen years later, Seymour endeavors to return to this issue, updating the findings original reported in Talking About Leaving and expanding her analysis to include examination of efforts by professors, departments, and school administrators to shrink attrition in STEM fields. Funds from this grant provide partial support to Seymour, her colleague Mark R. Connolly, and their team to conduct a series of new interviews at the same seven institutions sampled in Talking About Leaving and to support their subsequent analysis of the data they collect. Their efforts promise to provide new insights into what has changed and what has stayed the same when it comes to why undergraduates pursue or abandon STEM degrees.

In the 1990s, the Foundation supported a project by Elaine Seymour and Nancy Hewitt of the University of Colorado, Boulder and Mark Connolly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison to conduct extensive ethnographies of students at seven selective colleges and universities to determine why majors in STEM fields switch majors for other areas. The results of their work, Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, provides one of the most interesting, comprehensive accounts of what factors drive retention and attrition among undergraduates in STEM fields. Fifteen years later, Seymour endeavors to return to this issue, updating the findings original reported in Talking About Leaving and expanding her analysis to include examination of efforts by professors, departments, and school administrators to shrink attrition in STEM fields. Funds from this grant provide partial support to Seymour, her colleague Mark R. Connolly, and their team to conduct a series of new interviews at the same seven institutions sampled in Talking About Leaving and to support their subsequent analysis of the data they collect. Their efforts promise to provide new insights into what has changed and what has stayed the same when it comes to why undergraduates pursue or abandon STEM degrees.

Funds from this grant support the Institute on Teaching and Mentoring, an annual conference hosted by the Board of Control for Southern Regional Education, a 3.5-day professional development conference aimed at providing training, mentoring, career advice, and networking opportunities to African-American and Hispanic Ph.D. students. Funds will be used to support the organization of the conference for each of the next three years and to defray the costs of attendance by, program directors, faculty, and students involved in the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program.

This three-year grant supports the launch of a major initiative by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) to assist graduate students to gain knowledge in the assessment of student learning, both for the improvement of their own course-based teaching and for the reflective analysis of student learning outcomes at the level of a program or major. Partnering with five universities, CGS will partner with five universities to develop programs aimed at training graduate students in the best practices for assessing student learning and in implementing these practices in their courses, with special attention paid to large "gateway" science and math courses with high student attrition. Grant funds will also support three annual meetings and 2 summer workshops where learning assessment will be discussed, and a web-based clearinghouse for resources on the topic.

The National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering (NACME) has been the Foundation's longtime partner in its grantmaking in the Education for Underrepresented Groups program, administering both the Sloan Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership. NACME receives applications from 53 departments at the 34 universities participating in these programs, selects students for scholarships, administers awards, and supports recruitment efforts by faculty. The grant funds new obligations in these programs for the 2012-2013 academic year, including scholarships, recruiting support, and administrative costs.

This grant will fund a project by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) to evaluate the impact of the Foundation's Minority Ph.D. program. NORC will survey faculty at all 53 departments participating in the Minority Ph.D. program as well as all currently-enrolled graduate students supported through the program, and will attempt to track down and survey every former participant of these departments (whether with Ph.D. in hand or not) to determine what they did after their first job and where they are now. NORC will also track and survey Sloan-funded Ph.D. recipients from departments that once but no longer participate in the Minority Ph.D. program. NORC will then analyze these surveys to provide a complete picture of the career outcomes of all Ph.D. graduates who had received some part of their fellowship funding from Sloan. The output of this project will contribute to the evaluation of and improvements to the structure and performance of the Minority Ph.D. program.