Table 1 Reflections and perspectives from faculty leads at each site

Large, urban, metropolitan university (R2)

“The NE STEM 4U program has enhanced our institution and our community in so many ways. New partnerships and collaborations, both on campus and with our community stakeholders, are directly the result of establishing, strengthening and growing the NE STEM 4U program. Within the university, NE STEM has broken though long-standing silos to engage students, faculty and administrators from multiple units and colleges. It has also been a contributor to growing a new STEM Center administrative structure to increasingly support such programs. Within the community, solid and sustainable collaboration with schools and education advocacy groups has broadened our perspective and our reach. These new relationships built a foundation for new STEM initiatives that have resulted in funded discipline-based research programs addressing a wide range of important questions. As such, the program has enhanced faculty success and contributed to institutional excellence. Most importantly, NE STEM 4U has been fully transformative for our participating students. From the beginning, undergraduate students have taken advantage of the leadership and professional development opportunities of the program and middle school students in our community have responded enthusiastically to the programming. The benefits of NE STEM 4U for undergraduate students and for K-12 students have been documented and disseminated. After six years of developing and refining the program, incoming undergraduate students from many disciplines seek to join because they know about the opportunities for professional development. Some students wish to enhance their leadership skills, some wish to give back to the community, some wish to become better researchers, some wish to become better teachers. Some wish to do it all. We can point to many examples of students who have indeed done it all.”

Large, research-intensive land-grant institution (RI)

“Partnering with NE STEM 4U provided vital infrastructure, plans, guidance, training, and a built-in comparison group for our NIH grant. It was vital to have regular communication in order to learn what was assumed by the original site and needed to be explicit for our development and growth. We are starting small (one school the first semester, one school the second semester, two schools the third semester). Trying to create new activities for an emerging science field at the same time as we were learning how to be an NE STEM 4U site was very challenging and exciting. Having our mentors visit the original site to observe and learn, weekly meetings with the original site’s leader, and determining what we would adopt (e.g., formats, hiring expectations) and what we would not adopt (e.g., we did not start as a registered student organization). The challenge that we still have is how to find a permanent home for NE STEM 4U. We have 3.5 more years of funding and currently the program is in a Sociology Department, not a physical science department. We have learned what should be part of fundamental mentor training and what should be explicit in activity plans. Finally, our original focus was on developing middle school youth science identities and interest in health careers where the emphasis for the original program was on mentor professional development and retention in STEM. Therefore, we had to learn that we needed to also focus on mentor professional development and mentor community development. Having the ongoing coaching, support, and guidance as we grow our NE STEM 4U franchise has been vital to our continuation. In our third semester, we are at the point where we can mostly have the program run with less intense faculty/staff oversight and can also focus on developing more activities. Having our evaluators learn the Dimensions of Success (DOS) evaluation tool to provide feedback on emerging activities and the YPQA evaluation of the mentors gave us the necessary information to make ongoing improvements. We have also learned what to look for in hiring mentors and how to incorporate the mentor handbook and weekly reflection tools to support effective mentor development.”

Small, predominantly teaching, rural institution (PUI)

“The vision of the NE STEM 4U program at our university was to provide undergraduate students the opportunity to enhance their knowledge base of STEM, develop leadership, oral and written communication skills, and provide the opportunity to educate children (elementary & secondary) using their pedagogical background in their undergraduate degree. Our program was unique for we had mentors teach the NE STEM 4U science lesson and also included physical activities to assist the children in gaining a better understanding of STEM concepts taught for the day. We wanted to replicate the program because it utilized experiential learning and created a bridge to teach cross-curricular topics in a fun and creative way. We felt it had the potential to increase interest in STEM fields for both children and undergraduate mentors. The original franchise program already had a strong framework of lesson plans, so we were able to smoothly incorporate STEM based physical activities. The main challenges our program encountered were related to us being a new program. We learned the mentors needed to build relationships and trust with NE STEM 4U faculty, and with the children prior to having full buy-in of the program. The first semester our mentors dealt with behavior and classroom management issues which then transferred into difficulty in completing the teaching of the lessons. We believe the undergraduates were not adequately prepared, and made adjustments moving into the second semester of activities. The new mentors began with team building activities with NE STEM 4U faculty, and then utilized team building activities related to STEM concepts during the initial session with the children. These changes have positively addressed our initial challenges at the start of our NE STEM 4U Franchise.”