Identifying and Addressing Information Deficits for Minority Undergraduate Students in Science

From participation and retention rate data, there is little doubt that many minority inner-city students are having difficulty in adjusting to the rigorous information demands of high quality post secondary instructional programs in science and mathematics. The worldwide phenomenon of curriculum-time compression, where advanced subject matter is taught in less and less time and moved to lower levels of schooling (elementary, middle, and secondary), is particularly acute in the physical and biological sciences. Minority students from some of our nation's inner-city high school science preparatory programs are, in general, placed in a particularly difficult competitive position of having to quickly acquire this compressed information in order to effectively compete at university level science and engineering programs. Recent research evidence strongly suggests that more proactive instructional intervention procedures are required by colleges and universities if there is to be a significant increase in minority participation and retention in the physical and biological sciences. The purpose of this study is twofold: 1) to examine the extent of “information” disparity and deficits in prerequisite science information (biology) between target minority and other students in an undergraduate science program at a major university, and 2) to illustrate how technology based, formative evaluation procedures might be used to provide more effective instructional support for these students, thus increasing their participation and retention rates in the physical and biological sciences.