Biology Department, College of the Siskiyous, Weed, CA 96094.
CBE Life Sci Educ. 2022 Jun;21(2):ar25. doi: 10.1187/cbe.21-09-0237.
Community colleges have an opportunity to promote achievement of more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students and meet larger goals of scientific advancement and educational equity. Understanding community college students' needs and backgrounds is key to increasing students' success in STEM fields and realizing this potential. The objective of this paper is to use data from the U.S. Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics and other sources to characterize community college students and their academic achievement and to offer equity-based approaches to increase success, particularly in STEM. Here, I document that community college students, who constitute approximately one-third of U.S. undergraduates, are a unique population with greater proportions of underrepresented STEM minorities, parents, and students requiring developmental education. They are also more likely to be older, working, part-time, low-income, and first-generation students and more likely to differ demographically from faculty. I also found lower rates of academic achievement among community college students, including lower rates of retention and STEM degree attainment with evidence of even lower achievement for STEM underrepresented groups. The data point to the need for equity-based strategies to address achievement disparities for STEM community college students, including increasing community college faculty diversity and sensitivity to diverse students' needs and experiences; adopting inclusive, active-learning pedagogies; and reforming developmental education.
社区学院有机会促进更多的学生在科学、技术、工程和数学（STEM）领域取得成就，并实现科学进步和教育公平的更大目标。了解社区学院学生的需求和背景是提高学生在 STEM 领域取得成功的关键，也是实现这一潜力的关键。本文的目的是利用美国教育部国家教育统计中心和其他来源的数据来描述社区学院学生及其学业成就，并提供基于公平的方法来提高成功率，特别是在 STEM 领域。在这里，我记录了社区学院学生的情况，他们约占美国本科生的三分之一，是一个独特的群体，代表性不足的 STEM 少数群体、有父母的学生和需要发展性教育的学生比例更高。他们也更有可能年龄较大、工作、兼职、低收入和第一代学生，并且在人口统计学上与教师的差异更大。我还发现社区学院学生的学业成绩较低，包括保留率和 STEM 学位获得率较低，证据表明代表性不足的 STEM 群体的成绩甚至更低。这些数据表明，需要采取基于公平的策略来解决 STEM 社区学院学生的成绩差距问题，包括增加社区学院教师的多样性，提高对不同学生需求和经验的敏感性；采用包容性、主动学习的教学方法；并改革发展性教育。
