The Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program (GDEP): Building an Earth System Science Centered Research, Education, and Outreach Effort in Urban Long Beach, California

The Geoscience Diversity Enhancement Program (GDEP) is an NSF-OEDG funded project at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). Program goals include increasing awareness of geoscience careers, and the availability and accessibility of research experiences, to area high school and community college faculty and students from underrepresented groups. Begun in fall 2001, GDEP involves faculty leadership within three CSULB departments; geological sciences, geography, and anthropology, as well as five community colleges, and one of the largest K-12 school districts in California, Long Beach Unified. In addition, linkages to CSULB's outreach and student orientation activities are strong, with the facilitation of staff in CSULB's Student Access to Science and Mathematics (SAS) Center. During the first year, program activities centered around three major objectives: (1) creating the CSULB leadership team, and developing a robust and sustainable decision-making process, coupled with extensive relationship-building with community college and high school partners, (2) creating an evaluation plan that reflects institutional and leadership goals, and comprehensively piloting evaluation instruments, and, (3) designing and implementing a summer research experience, which was successfully inaugurated during summer 2002. We were very successful in achieving objective (1): each member of the leadership group took strong roles in the design and success of the program. Several meetings were held with each community college and high school faculty colleague, to clarify and reaffirm program values and goals. Objective (2), led by project evaluator David Whitney, resulted in an array of evaluation instruments that were tested in introductory geology, geography, and archaeology courses at CSULB. These evaluation instruments were designed to measure attitudes and beliefs of a diverse cross-section of CSULB students. Preliminary analysis of survey results reveals significant differences among ethnic groups in their perceptions and understanding of geoscience disciplines. Objective (3), the summer research experience, was also very successful: more than 25 faculty and students participated in the experience. Our preliminary analyses of the impact of the summer research experience show that research work combining field experiences, ready access to faculty mentors, and a team approach to investigations appeared most valuable to program participants.