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Contact Dan Brown

Email:
dbrown@hawaii.edu

Telephone:
(808) 974-7468

Fax:
(808)

Project Manager

Islands of Opportunity Alliance (IOA)-LSAMP Overview

Launched in 1991, the main goal of the National Science Foundations (NSF) Louis Stokes Alliances for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program was to encourage and facilitate access to careers in STEM fields for underrepresented populations. More specifically, NSF hoped to encourage these students to enroll in and complete baccalaureate programs in STEM, as well as to continue on to graduate studies in these fields. The LSAMP Program began with grants to six multi-institution collaborative efforts, called Alliances. Today, there are 39 Alliances with more than 500 participating institutions throughout the country, with the Islands of Opportunity Alliance being one of the newest additions.

The Islands of Opportunity Alliance builds upon the successes of past and current LSAMP Programs throughout the country, utilizing practices that have been shown to best accomplish the primary goal of increasing graduation rates of underrepresented students in STEM fields.  The Alliance has adapted these best practices to the unique cultural and geographic setting of the Pacific region, utilizing the extensive scholarship on cross-cultural communication and on learning styles of islander peoples, and administrative structures that have succeeded in spanning the vast distances between islands.

The four main objectives of the Islands of Opportunity Alliance are:

Objective 1:

Create, maintain, and/or expand alliance partnership activities designed to recruit well-qualified, under-represented community college students into STEM baccalaureate degree programs within the Islands of Opportunity Alliance universities.

Objective 2:

Provide internship and research experiences for those pursuing baccalaureate degrees in STEM disciplines. 

Objective 3:

Promote retention and progression rates amongst scholars by creating a scholarly learning community in which academic excellence is encouraged and supported through appropriate advising, mentoring, and academic support programs.

Objective 4:

Improve instruction in STEM courses, particularly the gateway science and mathematics courses, through faculty development of high context teaching approaches.