The student enthusiasm in the video is palpable. Thanks for sharing this. As I understand the video you are pairing existing Upward Bound programs with faculty and graduate student mentors. Is this correct? What is the nature and duration of the  training that graduate students and faculty mentors receive? How has their engagement altered the UB programs? Do you have a website where you share your best practices for mentoring diverse students in STEM? How do you (or will you) measure the success of the program on participating students, on the graduate mentors, and on participating faculty? Look forward to hearing more. Thanks!

Can you please say more about "Learning through Diversity"?   What are some of the best practices?

Interesting work. How are students matched with the different Universities? 

Thank you all for the comments. We are very excited about this project. Graduate and Faculty work with our Science specialist, curriculum coaches and advisors from the pre-college programs to learn from them about classroom that are inquiry based and hands-on and in return the faculty and graduate volunteers make the lessons college level. Faculty and graduate students are able to inform of us about the importance and uses of the science and math to get our students college ready. We are currently scaling up the program with the funding from NSF INCLUDES and evaluation data will be available later through quantitative data and qualitative surveys and focus groups. From our experiences at the University of Rochester, we have increased our STEM offerings for Upward Bound students dramatically, from 0 classes taught by faculty to over 15 courses and growing. We have six students working as Research Assistants in labs, with one his way to be published. 

I agree with Joni that the student engagement and excitement is palpable - and they seem to be interacting with complex scientific ideas and experiments, too. I'm interested in whether the students in your Launch Pilot are those who came to the experience already interested in science. And, with that, are you attempting to engage those students who might not already express interest in pursuing science?