Summer Ventures in Science and Mathematics is a four-week summer enrichment program where high school students study a variety of STEM topics. This article explores how participation in the Mathematical Evolution course affected students' skills in research, communication, and scientific reasoning and changes in self-efficacy towards STEM. Data…

This study explored a place-based summer enrichment offering for gifted rural students through the lens of a critical pedagogy of place (Greenwood, 2003). To ameliorate well-documented opportunity gaps for rural students, we established a residential camp on our university's campus where middle school students engaged in STEM and humanities…

The proportion of underrepresented minority (URM) students graduating with Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) degrees, matriculating to graduate programs, and entering the STEM workforce continues to be significantly low. The Virginia-North Carolina Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (the VA-NC Alliance)…

When public schools closed their doors in the spring of 2020, an estimated 3 million students went missing from formal schooling of any sort. During the beginning of the 2020-21 school year, a mixture of public confusion and mistrust of guidelines coming from state and federal authorities led to a churn of reopening and reclosing schools. However,…

This paper examines the relation between children's summer activities before fourth through sixth grade and their vocabulary knowledge in fifth grade and at age fifteen using the NICHD SECCYD dataset (N = 1,009). We used OLS regression and propensity score analyses to understand how children's summer reading, library visits, participation in…

This dissertation study concerned the lack of underrepresented minority students matriculating through the health professions pipeline. The term pipeline is "the educational avenue by which one must travel to successfully enter a profession" (Sullivan Alliance, 2004). There are a significant number of health professional pipeline…

Since 2012, the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation has supported educational enrichment in rural areas by awarding over $3.3 million in grants to six outstanding organizations operating in Iowa, Indiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia. In this report, the authors combine the experiences of these organizations with findings from the…

For almost twenty-five years, North Carolina State University has helped to coordinate a state-wide Mathematics and Science Education Network Pre-College Program that serves disadvantaged youth in grades six through twelve. The university-school partnership includes middle school and high school academic enrichment in math, science, and…