In Summer 2025, 36 faculty members from institutions across the nation came together in Mississippi to learn more about how rural matters to postsecondary STEM students’ success. At the Summer Institute, participants shared about their current or recent S-STEM projects and their interest in further investigations and formed Network Groups. Across the 2025-2026 school year, Network Groups met regularly to focus their ideas, explore related literature, investigate methodologies, and draft a research plan. Network Group facilitators, S-STEM faculty with experience in education research methodology, facilitated each group’s meetings. Learn a little about each group below.
Observing STEM Social Contact in Rural Students as Predictor of Student Engagement
Delta is studying how “STEM social contact” — students’ interactions with mentors, peers, advisors, faculty, and staff who connect them to STEM people, resources, and opportunities — predicts engagement with programmatic supports, and how that relationship depends on rurality. Their guiding premise: relational access to STEM matters most when structural or geographic access is limited. The work draws on Communities of Practice and Social Capital Theory, treating sense of belonging as a key mechanism linking social contact to engagement.
Since January 2026, the group has moved into site-level data collection: they completed a site data report, defined shared rurality indicators (population size, distance to postsecondary institutions, commute infrastructure, high school size, local economic conditions), and mapped four types of programmatic supports across sites, surfacing three recurring engagement themes — participation, consistency, and voluntary vs. required attendance.
TEAM: Ruopu Li (Southern Illinois University), Jiayue “Joyce” Shen (SUNY Polytechnic Institute), Walter Den (Texas A&M University–San Antonio), Xiao Chang (Tuskegee University), Faith Yarberry (University of Central Arkansas), Sara Johnson and Karly Cochran (University of North Alabama), Erin Speetzen (University of Wisconsin–Stevens Point)
Perceptions of Rurality & STEM Belongingness
Grove is investigating how definitions of rurality — and their relationship to sense of belonging in STEM — vary across geographic regions (e.g., the Midwest, Appalachia, the Southeast). Their thinking is anchored in the Model of Multiple Dimensions of Identity (MMDI; Jones & McEwen, 2000), which frames identity as a core of personal attributes shaped by surrounding context, plus the concept of salience — awareness of an identity dimension that emerges from the interaction between self and context. The group argues this is fundamentally a rural question because “rural” means different things in different places, and measurement itself is inconsistent across USDA, Census, and distance-based definitions.
Their methods pair a zip-code-based rurality measure with two validated scales — the Rural Perception Scale and Rural Identity Scale — and the STEM Identity Scale’s belonging dimension, surveyed across S-STEM and S-STEM-eligible students. Data collection isn’t expected until Fall 2026; spring is focused on survey design.
TEAM: Elica Moss (Alabama A&M University), Joe Flaherty (Coker University), Miranda Karban (Illinois College), Cassandra Birrenkott (South Dakota School of Mines and Technology), Darlene M Olsen (Norwich University), April Kilgore (Somerset Community College), Christa Winkler (Mississippi State University)
The Rural Community Interface with STEM
Prairie’s overarching question is how rural students’ community backgrounds, campus contexts, and institutional structures shape their awareness of, access to, and engagement with STEM opportunities across their college journey. The group’s work spans several sub-projects: recruiting students from and into rural communities, STEM-focused civic engagement, mentoring across dispersed satellite campuses, institutional vs. non-institutional barriers to internships, and an economic analysis of STEM education’s value in rural communities. Their thinking is framed by Ecological Systems Theory, Community Cultural Wealth, and place-based perspectives, with particular interest in how “STEM density” (visibility/availability of STEM on a campus or in a community) shapes students’ awareness of opportunities.
The internship-barriers sub-project is furthest along, sorting barriers into financial, opportunity, and policy factors (institutional) versus employment, course loads, and caregiving obligations (non-institutional), with a working hypothesis that rural students face more non-institutional barriers at rural host institutions. That group is finalizing its survey instrument, targeting IRB approval by end of July ahead of a fall deployment; other sub-projects are still operationalizing measures like “STEM density.”
TEAM: Kit Carlson (Madison Area Technical College), Ivelitza Garcia (Allegheny College), Christin Monroe (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign), Anni Moore (Morningside University), Callum Hetherington (Texas Tech University), with community partner Doreen Van Ryswyk (USFWS, Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge)
Science and Place Identity and Their Perceived Compatibility
Ridge is measuring how STEM majors at six Midwest undergraduate colleges report their science identity and place-based (rural/non-rural) identity, and how compatible those two identities feel to students — including whether self-identified rural status lines up with objective geographic classifications (RUCA/NCES). The literature has examined science identity alongside first-generation and underrepresented-minority status, but the group has identified a gap around place-based identity specifically. The study is framed by the Expanded Model of Science Identity (Hazari et al., 2010; Huffmyer et al., 2022).
Their instrument uses pictorial “overlap” scales asking students to rate the overlap between their self-image and a STEM professional, between self and a rural identity, and between rural and STEM-professional identities directly, alongside the Rural Identity Scale and a STEM Belonging Survey. IRB approval is complete at the lead institution, reliance agreements are in progress, and a full survey is planned for Fall 2026.
TEAM: Sundeep Rayat (Ball State University), Lori Anne Watson (Earlham College), Courtney Hatch (Hendrix College), Matthew Kreitzer & Stephen Leonard (Indiana Wesleyan University), Kyle Knust & Emily Olson (Millikin University), Barbara Kramer (Truman State University)
Academic Help-Seeking
River set out asking what rural students are thinking as they enter college science education, and has since converged on its primary question: does rural student identity influence academic help-seeking — how often rural vs. non-rural STEM students use course supports (office hours, tutoring, TA meetings), what drives or discourages that use, and how it affects self-efficacy going forward. A related early question asked whether rural high schools’ science/math resources shape belonging in STEM gateway courses. Literature (McNamee et al., 2025) describes rural students feeling “othered” when faculty and peers don’t recognize their place-based skills or the diversity of rural backgrounds.
The group is weighing theoretical lenses — expectancy-value theory vs. a dedicated help-seeking theory (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997) — alongside Bourdieu’s Cultural Capital Theory and Yosso’s Community Cultural Wealth as competing deficit- vs. asset-based framings. They’re planning a mixed-methods design (survey plus student interviews) and are still finalizing sequencing. Spring work centers on finishing the literature review and designing instruments.
TEAM: Amy Chambers (Tennessee Tech University), Dayna DeFeo (University of Alaska, Anchorage), Hannah Kinmonth (Tennessee Tech University), Moses Ntam (Tuskegee University), Hamza Raheel (Bismarck State College), Wendy Smith (Tennessee Tech University)
FACILITATORS: Angela Hodgson and Tara Slominski (North Dakota State University)
AI Literacy Among Rural STEM Students
Valley is studying rural S-STEM students’ understanding of, use of, and attitudes toward generative AI, with particular attention to parenting students as a focal group largely absent from STEM higher-ed literature. Their questions ask how rural students define and use AI literacy in their discipline, and what hopes and concerns they hold about AI’s future impact on themselves, their families, and their region. The group frames this as inherently a rural question: AI discourse centers urban contexts, rural communities face distinct access barriers, and rural students bring resource-adaptive perspectives that position them as knowledge producers, not passive recipients.
Four frameworks guide the work — Sense of Belonging, Critical Digital Literacy, Asset-Based Community Development, and Community Cultural Wealth — chosen to center students’ existing strengths rather than a deficit lens. Their design is a two-phase survey study: Phase 0 secures IRB approvals and builds the Qualtrics instrument over Summer 2026; Phase 1 pilots a ~15–20 question survey with Valley institutions in Fall 2026; a planned Phase 2 will expand to all willing network institutions, aiming toward a blog post and peer-reviewed publication.
TEAM: Jason Wallace (Mississippi State, MS), Maria Siopsis (Maryville College, TN), Sherri Frizell (Prairie View A&M, TX), Tina Cheuk (Cal Poly, CA), Jane Lehr (Cal Poly, CA), Dom Dal Bello (Allan Hancock College, CA), Jing Yan (Tennessee State, TN), Jenna Johnson (Mississippi State, MS), Xianfa Xie (Virginia State, VA)