This project extends the development and support of disciplinary communities to achieve breakthroughs in designing clear, effective, and student-centered program pathways from California Community Colleges to four-year public universities via the Program Pathways Mapper. The Program Pathways Mapper visually clarifies student pathways through college, facilitating transfer and degree completion, particularly for students who are first-generation college students with little social capital or “college knowledge.” Additionally, these clarified STEM program pathways help college and university personnel be more effective, consistent, and intentional in their support of student completion goals (for more information on the original project design, visit this project page).
The collaborative work of the scaling project leverages our success and experience in convening discipline faculty groups and creating small breakout teams comprising discipline faculty, counselors, advisors, specialists, and articulation officers. Teams will initially focus on expanding the number of institutions with clear maps of the programmatic “lay of the land” for Engineering, Computer Science, and Public Health. These maps will then be used to identify obstacles and issues inherent in the pathways. The task of the discipline work groups includes brainstorming ways to address identified obstacles and challenges. The project team will “skillify” the curriculum as a technique to allow a granular and data-based fit/gap analysis of the content connection across related courses. This approach analyzes course artifacts such as course outlines of record and syllabi for a result that is a structured set of key skills that will provide aid in resolving “sticky wicket” issues around how lower division courses prepare students for success in upper division courses and when to best teach specific skills and at what level.
