START program survey will compare student experiences

If you are an undergraduate student majoring in ENV, BIO, or MAT, then you are invited to participate in an upcoming survey concerning JSC’s Student Transition, Achievement, Retention and Teaching Scholarship (START) program. The survey is part of a comparative study being conducted by Drs. Leslie Kanat and Julie Theoret to discern the effectiveness of START. The concept of this study was first featured in Current Topics of Science when it was presented by Theoret under the title, “Assessment of Academic Opportunities and Support Structures for Math and Science Students.” According to Theoret, one of the goals of this study is to gather data and compare the different experiences of START students and non-START students.

 
The survey will consist of questions focusing on your experiences at JSC, and it should only take around 15 minutes to complete. There will be open-ended and Likert scale type questions along with multiple choice. The survey will be administered via your JSC email, and you will receive a link that you can click on to participate. It will only be available for completion during a certain window of time, and its expected release date will be around late March or early April.

 
This survey will be confidential, so you will not be publicly identified and your responses will not be able to be traced back to you. As such, feel free to be open with your answers. Full participation and truthful responses will help to improve JSC. The data from the survey will be collected and analyzed this summer, and the general results will be available for anyone who is interested in viewing them. If it turns out that START students have more positive experiences at JSC than non-START students, the next phase in the study will be to strategize ways in which all students at JSC can have the same opportunities.

 
“The ultimate goal is [that] we want to make it better for all of the math and science students, but really all [JSC] students,” said Theoret.