AC 2011-2496: USING EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING TO INSPIRE, EDU- CATE, AND EMPOWER UNDERREPRESENTED UNDERGRADUATES IN STEM

The vision of the Quality of Life Technology Engineering Research Center (QoLT ERC) is to transform the lives of people with reduced functional capabilities due to aging or disability through intelligent devices and systems. Through the ERC mechanism, a comprehensive education and outreach program has been developed to inspire, educate, and empower students, especially those with disabilities. Through a well-established experiential learning initiative, the QoLT Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, we have transformed students from dependent to independent thinkers, given them a sense of accomplishment and exposure to potential end-users, and provided experience on a project that has a genuine fit to an ongoing ERC project. The benefits of this program have resulted in personal gains of participants, an increased number of underrepresented students in STEM graduate school programs, and the creation of a new program designed to transition veteran students with disabilities in to STEM education, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded Experiential Learning for Veterans in Assistive Technology and Engineering (ELeVATE). Students are active participants and innovators in projects which address real-world problems with systems-level engineering efforts, serving as a natural attractor to the discipline. Facilitating the programs collaboratively is in itself a best practice; it allows for an enhanced cohort, peer-topeer mentoring, and maximization of resources for a sustainable training program designed to increase the retention and promotion of underrepresented undergraduates in STEM disciplines. Though ELeVATE will only begin in the summer of 2011, its foundations are deep rooted in the success of QoLT’s REU program which has advanced underrepresented students through the STEM pipeline and delivered a promising model. Assessment efforts developed through the REU program will be adapted to evaluate this cohort with the goal of contributing towards the bodies of literature surrounding experiential learning, veterans in STEM education, and retention and promotion of underrepresented students in STEM.