Howard Hughes Medical Institute awards Rice $1.9 million for STEM innovation

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) on Thursday awarded a $1.9 million, four-year grant to Rice University to alter several of its introductory science courses to include strategies that have proven extraordinarily successful at increasing retention of science and engineering majors in Rices innovative hands-on global health technologies programs.

The new grant is part of a $60 million effort HHMI launched with 37 grants to develop effective strategies to significantly reduce the attrition rate of students majoring in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, also known as STEM.

According to HHMI, more than 1 million students enter college each year intending to major in in STEM disciplines. Of those, fewer than half complete a STEM baccalaureate degree, and the attrition rate for underrepresented minorities is even worse as much as 80 percent.

We know that most of the attrition occurs in the first two years of college, when students are taking introductory gateway courses in chemistry, math and biology, said Sean Carroll, vice president for science education at HHMI. For some students, the introductory courses are their only exposure to science.

Rebecca Richards-Kortum, Rices Stanley C. Moore Professor in Bioengineering, chair of the Department of Bioengineering and the principal investigator on the new HHMI grant, said Rice does significantly better than the national average at retaining its STEM majors.

About 60 percent of Rice students pursue STEM degrees, and our faculty have long been committed to keeping them engaged both by incorporating inquiry-based methods in introductory STEM courses and through laboratory research opportunities, Richards-Kortum said.

Despite these efforts, Richards-Kortum said at least one-quarter of incoming STEM freshmen end up changing to a non-STEM major, and the rates are significantly higher for women and underrepresented minorities.

In 2006, with funding from HHMI, Rice launched a novel undergraduate global health program called Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), which challenges students to come up with practical solutions to real-world problems in the developing world. The program caught on quickly at Rice; within four years, more than 10 percent of the universitys undergraduates had taken at least one BTB class. Rice institutionalized the program by establishing a minor in global health technologies (GLHT) in 2008.

GLHT students work to solve open-ended challenges beginning in their freshman year, and the curriculum is designed to keep students engaged in real-world problem-solving throughout their entire undergraduate experience. The program has been recognized as a national model for inquiry-based education by both Science magazine and the National Academy of Engineering.

Weve found that STEM attrition rates are significantly lower among our global health students, Richards-Kortum said. In fact, the program actually spurs some non-STEM students to change their majors to a STEM field.

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Howard Hughes Medical Institute awards Rice $1.9 million for STEM innovation