Current and Recent Projects – CSSR

We bring together a diverse team of scholars, practitioners, and partners with expertise in corrections, disability, intersectionality, UD, education policy, and research methods. This team collaboratively develops a robust agenda to transform the correctional education system toward greater equity.

Center for Student Success Research Leads: Ryan Wells

Collaborators: Michael Krezmien

Funder: Spencer Foundation

This is an interdisciplinary partnership between three UMass Amherst entities: the Center for Student Success Research (CSSR), the UMass Libraries’ Evidence Synthesis Partnership (ESP), and the Undergraduate Student  Success Center (USSC). This partnership, formally known as the Student Success Research and Practice Collaborative (SSRPC), conducts systematic reviews and synthesizes evidence from the student success literature in higher education. The SSRPC is designed to serve as a research infrastructure that translates fragmented scholarship into coherent, equity-focused insights to inform institutional decision-making, policy development, and future externally funded research. 

Center for Student Success Research Lead: Musbah Shaheen

Collaborators: Ryan Wells, Eric Toole, Jennifer Friedman, Carolyn Basset, Katrina Calhoun, Betsy Cracco, Nasrat Sayed

Funder: UMass College of Education Seed Grant

Narrating Productive Jewish-Muslim Encounters in College Using Graphic Stories: A Pilot Study at UMass Amherst

Center for Student Success Research Lead: Musbah Shaheen

Funder: UMass Faculty Research Grant/Healy Endowment Grant

The purpose of this project is to estimate the effect of developmental education on the college persistence of students with learning and attention disabilities. These students are often not prepared well by their secondary education experiences and may benefit more than other students from the goals of developmental education, which are to bolster students’ foundational skills in order to reduce dropout and increase success. However, developmental education could be more detrimental to this group given the lack of attention to individual need and personalized delivery in developmental education. This study utilizes data from the High School Longitudinal Study and a doubly robust research design, combining coarsened exact matching with regression techniques, to estimate causal effects. It considers two-year and four-year institutions as unique given heterogeneity in their prevalence of students with learning and attention disabilities, treating institution type as a moderating factor. By examining whether developmental education in college helps to break a cycle of disadvantage, or in fact contributes to it, findings from this study will influence ongoing developmental education reforms, as well as the practices of disability services offices and counselors in college, all aimed at improving the college success for this growing yet underserved population of students.

Center for Student Success Research Lead: Ryan Wells 

Funder: Spencer Foundation

This project is a partnership with the Integrated Concentration in Science (iCons) program housed in the College of Natural Sciences at UMass Amherst that examines student learning through interdisciplinary honors program focused on problems of practice. The three-year collaboration includes a qualitative grounded theory study of the program, a mixed methods survey design, and analysis of longitudinal learning outcomes. To learn more about iCons, visit their website: http://icons.cns.umass.edu/

Center for Student Success Research Leads: Ryan Wells, Genia Bettencourt, Ezekiel Kimball

Collaborators: Scott Auerbach, Justin Fermann

Research on broadening students’ participation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) typically focuses on individuals’ experiences in STEM or on specific learning contexts (schools, colleges, or universities). Far less research has taken an organizational approach to examine structures and communication practices within and between organizations that reduce barriers and enhance opportunities as students navigate through institutions and transition from one institution to another during their educational journey. Research on collaborative infrastructure that brings people and organizations together who otherwise work in isolation provides a way to identify effective communication practices and organizational structure that can be replicated and scaled at other sites in order to promote student recruitment, retention, and success in STEM during key transition periods in development. To that end, our proposed project will shed light on a multi-organization research-practitioner collaboration in Western Massachusetts between an informal learning community organization with a large public research university and local schools; STEM internship organizations in Western Massachusetts; local colleges; participating adolescents and their families; and Girls Inc. National that collectively work on a program called “Eureka.” Eureka has successfully enhanced girls’ engagement and success in science as they transition from middle school to high school and beyond in economically underserved communities.

Center for Student Success Research Leads: Ezekiel Kimball, Chrystal George Mwangi, Ryan Wells

Collaborators: Nilanjana Dasgupta, Mark Pachucki

Funder: National Science Foundation