About Project
The use of information systems to assist underrepresented
community college STEM students in their upskilling transfer to
universities and job market success is a critical but challenging
goal of higher education.
Existing research on student counselling and advising is primarily
concerned with investigating factors influencing student success,
which are mostly restricted to demographic and academic variables. The
intervention formats are restricted to a variety of programs such as
mentorship and living-learning communities. The overarching goal of
this proposal is to investigate the research challenges underlying the
design of an innovative AI-driven student advising system,
complementary to university counselling that will provide personalized
readiness assessment and suggestions, with a primary focus on
underrepresented transfer students in STEM majors.
This project is supported by a grant from the National Science
Foundation (NSF IIS-2219623).
The new framework will take into account cognitive and behavioural
data as well as social media influences on top of student academic
performance. It will exploit techniques from natural language
processing, machine learning, and recommender systems. The project
will also build research capacity at participating Hispanic Serving
Institutions by establishing a sustainable faculty collaboration
network, expanding research domains at each institution, creating
regular workshops, and providing underrepresented students with
research-oriented training opportunities.
