This award is for the funding of a regional conference to study the future of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education, the educational advancement of learners from underrepresented and disadvantaged groups with regards to STEM, and STEM job growth and workforce development in a regional, as opposed to a national, context. The project brings together regional K-16 stakeholders (teachers, administrators, policy makers, community college and four-year college faculty) with STEM education experts to address the major challenges and opportunities in supporting outstanding local programs that prepare students for STEM college-level study and careers, with a special emphasis on preparing under-represented populations. It is designed to bring together researchers and educators from the lower to mid-Hudson River Valley region of New York to layout the contours of current K-16 STEM practice, particularly from the point of view of what efforts are not working, why they are not working, and how to make these efforts work. The project is a partnership with Rockland Community College and CEJJES Institute. Approximately 150 participants from area schools and colleges in New York are expected to attend, representing approximately 200,000 K-12 public schools and 100,000 college students in a region where STEM-related industries are a prominent and growing influence.

The overarching goal of the Conference is to promote regional strategies that will enable this generation of learners, especially those from under-represented groups, to take their place in 21st century STEM careers. It is suggested that such a gathering of individuals and groups concerned with STEM education, as proposed in this project, would address four key questions: (1) How are knowledge and skill requirements for college-level study and careers in STEM changing the preparation needed for K-16? What changes need to be made with respect to curriculum, teachers and teaching, laboratories and access to resources, and in-school and out-of-school learning to improve the regional STEM outcomes? What strategies and practices can be adopted to support and advance STEM education throughout the region? (2) What are effective strategies for advancing the academic success of under-represented groups in STEM and how can they be successfully implemented in this region? (3) How does changing context for STEM education impact the knowledge and pedagogical skill requirements needed for being an effective K-16 STEM educator? What pedagogical strategies are best suited for teaching 21st century STEM skills? How well are teachers' professional development needs being met? What are some strategies for ensuring that the region?s teachers have access to the STEM professional development they need? (4) What are some current models of regional school/community/college partnerships for strengthening the K-16 STEM pipeline? How do these models address regional needs in ways that school districts cannot respond on their own? What solutions would be a good fit for this region? What unique ways in which Community Colleges and other share educational resources, serve as a STEM resource for students in middle school through college? What are the implications of this strategy for other regions concerned about K-16 STEM education?

Regional strategies offer a viable and scalable model for addressing K-16 STEM, especially when they reinforce the availability of services and support that would go beyond the reach of individual school districts. As a result of conference activities, the project will create and maintain a conference website with video capture of key elements of the presentations, conference proceedings and information and materials collected. The website will also be available for shared resources, scholarly papers, and the facilitating of future dialogue.

This project is examining the relationship between specific technology-based motivational activities and grade 5 to 9 student interest in STEM careers through a variety of classroom-based experiences. Students will be exposed to the work of STEM professionals, take a scripted two-day mathematics lesson, solve problems in algebra, and respond to questionnaires immediately after and six months after the experience. The study will vary the technological context of the induction experiences and hold constant the instructional component. The project will test a series of specific hypotheses relating motivation, self-efficacy, STEM career interest, and mathematics learning to activity assignment. Student induction activities will involve watching career-related videos that provide the context of the to-be-solved problems; assuming the identity of a STEM professional in a multi-user virtual environment (MUVE); or receiving a narrative description of the problem-solving context from the teacher using PowerPoint-like presentation media.

Students will be provided opportunities to explore, represent, and analyze real-life situations which involve varying quantities based on a model of how professionals use algebra. The project expects students to find such activities more motivating and have longer lasting effects than found in typical instruction.

This research study is examining the persistence of improved teacher skills achieved during the K-2 Science & Technology Assistance for Rural Teachers and Small Districts project (K-2 STARTS) funded by the State of California.

K-2 STARTS provided four years of professional development to teachers in 16 rural school districts in California with high populations of traditionally underserved students. 39 teachers each received 110 hours of professional development. Project data indicate that the project met its goals by increasing teacher content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, abilities to integrate science and literacy and to use research-based instructional strategies. K-2 STARTS also improved the capacity of teachers to use science resources and to network with teachers from their own and other rural districts.

This project is doing a longitudinal research study by extending data collection for 35 teachers for two years after the end of K-2 STARTS. It is using the measures from the original evaluation, which include teacher surveys and interviews, classroom observations, surveys for school administrators, teacher-developed unit artifacts, and student science notebooks, and adding two more measures, administrative interviews and school/district documents. In the final year, the project is doing data analysis and dissemination. The project is exploring the persistence of the knowledge and skills of the teachers over time, as well as their continued use of science instructional practices. It will also study the persistence of school/district support for science education.

External evaluation is being conducted by Dr. Loretta Kelley of Kelley, Peterson, and Associates, Inc. It focuses on project progress through formative and summative components.

Longitudinal studies of the effects of teacher professional development are rare. The increased knowledge concerning the persistence of the new knowledge and skills obtained through K-2 STARTS professional development, and why and to what extent they decay over time, is a significant goal.

Morehouse College proposes a research and development project to recruit high school African American males to begin preparation for secondary school science, technology, engineering and mathematics(STEM) teaching as a career. The major goal of the program is to recruit and prepare students for careers in secondary mathematics and science teaching thus increasing the number of African Americans students in STEM. The research will explore possible reasons why the program is or is not successful for recruiting and retaining students in STEM Teacher Education programs including: (a) How do students who remain in STEM education differ from those who leave and how do these individual factors (e.g. student preparation, self efficacies, course work outcomes, attitudes toward STEM/STEM education, connectivity to STEM/STEM education communities, learning styles, etc) enhance or inhibit interest in STEM teaching among African American males? (b) What organizational and programmatic factors (e.g. high school summer program, Saturday Academy, pre-freshman program, summer research experience, courses, enhanced mentoring, cyber-infrastructure, college admissions guidance, leadership training, instructional laboratory, program management, faculty/staff engagement and availability, Atlanta Public Schools and Morehouse College articulation and partnership) affect (enhance or inhibit) interest in STEM teaching among African American males?

Two cohorts of 40 students will spend six weeks in an intensive summer program with a follow-up Saturday Academy during their senior year before formally beginning their academic careers at Morehouse College. The program will integrate STEM education with teacher preparation and mentoring in order to develop secondary teachers who have mastery in both a STEM discipline as well as educational theory.

This pre-service program for future teachers will recruit 80 promising eleventh grade African American male students from the Atlanta Public School District to participate in a four-year program that will track them into the Teacher Preparation program at Morehouse College. The research will focus on the utility and efficacy of early recruitment of African American male students to STEM teaching careers as a mechanism to increase the number of African American males in STEM teaching careers.

Transforming Teaching Through Implementing Inquiry (T2I2) is a full research and development project that explores the use of cyberinfrastructure to significantly enhance the delivery and quality of professional development (PD) for grades 8-12 engineering, technology, and design educators. The goal of the project is to study whether the use of highly interactive cyberinfrastructure increases this target audience's: 1) understanding of engineering design concepts and ability to effectively teach them 2) understanding of how to address student learning needs 3) ability to manage, monitor, and adjust the learning environment 4) use of self assessment to enhance teaching ability and 5) engagement in a community of practice. These issues are of particular interest because of the limited resources in place to prepare pre-service engineering and CTE teachers, as well as a lack of in-service PD.

The content for the PD is grounded in the materials and processes of two projects reviewed by the National Research Council's (NRC) report review committee: Technology Education: Learning by Design for Middle Schools" and "Engineering by Design for High Schools." By incorporating an object-oriented generic system design (learning objects), the cyberinfrastructure is set to be reusable, adaptable, and scalable. These learning objects allow for customization of the learning experience, whereby learning facilitators or learners themselves can configure the system based on their specific needs. Delivering learning objects in an online framework enables teachers to develop and grow in a network community.

A mixed methods approach is used to determine effects of professional development. Student achievement is measured by comparing each site's state assessments in the following areas: the curriculum's technology, engineering, and design assessment, end-of-grade mathematics assessment, and end-of-grade science assessment. Both formative and summative evaluation strategies inform the development and implementation of the project. As such, the project will advance theory, design, and practice in middle and high school enginee

The project is an extended planning grant that leverages the growing existence of and interest in green school buildings and uses this as an opportunity to involve students in STEM activities relevant to their environment. The goal is to produce an action plan for transforming the middle school science and mathematics curriculum by rethinking the content that is taught, the ways in which students and teachers can engage effectively with that content, and the role that technology can play to ensure wide access to the data and to the new curriculum. By doing so, the project could help a new generation learn to apply STEM knowledge and practices to decisions throughout their lives.

AAAS has a unique capacity to bring together highly qualified people and prestigious institutions to work towards a common purpose, and that ability is fully displayed in this proposal. The project assembles experts in all related fields (middle school teachers, university faculty in STEM and in education and cognition, researchers, curriculum experts, and technology developers), which is an effective strategy to surface the best ideas, ensure broad ownership, and provide leadership. The development process moves from meetings of experts to a prototype that undergoes limited testing. The project uses web-based technologies for a number of purposes, including to share real time data on green buildings and to foster collaboration and teamwork. Because of this, the project could disseminate readily to other schools and even to informal institutions.

The project has a number of deliverables. These include three documents: a needs assessment related to the theme, a conceptual framework that connects disciplines and identifies boundaries, and an instructional framework that includes the design principles and the supporting technologies. In addition, the products include a single prototype activity with limited field testing and a blueprint for the use of technology and data sharing in curriculum design. The project begins with national discipline-specific learning goals (AAAS Project 2061, the National Research Council, the College Board, and Achieve) and builds on those goals and themes. The products include a new form of materials development based on current research and the commonly held belief that schools need to leverage resources and technologies in order to involve learners in more interesting and relevant activities that focus on important ideas.

The project investigates the use of robotics into early childhood education. It address two objectives: to develop and evaluate a low-cost, developmentally appropriate robotic construction kit specifically designed for early childhood education (PreK-2) and to pilot a robotics-based professional development model for early childhood educators to teach engineering and technology. A number of research questions are included. To what extent did participating teachers gained knowledge about robotics, engineering and programming, and pedagogies? To what extent have they increased their familiarity of, comfort with, and understanding of the use of robotics in early childhood? To what extent participating in the institute can support the passage from knowledge to action? What processes/standards are used by early childhood teachers to integrate engineering and technology into their traditional curriculum? Do teachers adopt the robotics kit and curriculum for their classrooms? How do they adapt it to their own practices? What are the factors that predict successful outcomes in terms of adoption and adaptation? To what extent has the teaching practice of the teachers changed in a way that demonstrates understanding of the role of T and E in early childhood education?

Robotics provides a playful bridge to make early childhood programs more academically challenging while honoring the importance of play in the developmental trajectory. The assumption is that young children can become engineers by playing with gears, levers, motors, sensors; and programmers by exploring sequences, loops and variables. Robotics can be a gateway for children to learn about applied mathematical concepts, the scientific method of inquiry, and problem solving. Moreover, working with robotic manipulatives engages children in social interactions and negotiations while playing to learn and learning to play.

For robotics to be successfully integrated into the early childhood classroom, there are three factors that need to be considered: the robotics technology needs to be developmentally appropriate and low-cost; and teachers should be exposed to professional development. This project addresses these issues. It contributes to the emerging field of robotics in education by addressing the needs of an educational segment, early childhood, where there is a lack of new technologies and approaches to teach technology and engineering in a developmentally appropriate way.

Concerns about both economic competitiveness and educational equity emphasize the need for the United States to broaden and diversify the pipeline of students prepared and motivated to pursue STEM college majors. An emerging strategy for addressing this need is large-scale implementation of inclusive STEM high schools. In this exploratory project, investigators from SRI International and George Washington University are laying the foundation for a rigorous quasi-experiment to test the effects of attending such a school using longitudinal student records, surveys, and interviews. The project's operational definition for an inclusive STEM high school (ISHS) is a school, school within a school, or school program that accepts students primarily on the basis of interest rather than aptitude or prior achievement and gives them the mathematics and science preparation they need to succeed in a STEM college major. ISHSs enroll students from groups underrepresented in STEM professions through an application process that does not require high test scores before high school entry. In contrast to selective STEM schools that admit gifted and talented students on the basis of entrance examination scores and thus select for perceived STEM aptitude, ISHSs have the more ambitious goal of developing STEM expertise.

To establish the feasibility of a large, multi-state investigation of the effectiveness of inclusive STEM schools at scale, researchers are:

- Developing a tentative taxonomy of ISHSs and exploring implications of ISHS heterogeneity for the research design;

- Recruiting three school partners representing different ISHS approaches;

- Using state data to identify a comparison school (without a particular focus on STEM) for each ISHS school partner and recruiting comparison school partners;

- Developing School Leader and three student surveys (fall 9th-grade, spring 12th-grade, and spring post-graduation);

- Collaborating with partner schools in design of data collection procedures, recruiting materials, and incentives;

- Piloting the School Leader Survey and two student surveys (9th-grade fall survey and 12th-grade spring survey) in six partner schools;

- Identifying and recruiting a larger sample of ISHSs and matched comparison schools for Year 2 data collection;

- Administering surveys in 40 or more high schools;

- Locating spring 2012 graduates of the three ISHS partner schools and pilot testing the post-graduation student survey with these students; and

- Engaging an Advisory Board who will provide methodological expertise and advice.

Ultimately, by documenting survey response rates, student location rates, and rates for successful matching of student administrative and survey data, this feasibility work is demonstrating that it is possible to collect the kind of data that would enable a large-scale study to be launched with the necessary instruments and experience in hand. As evidenced by the recent call from the President's Council of Advisors in Science and Technology for 1,000 new STEM schools and the National Research Council's report entitled "Successful K-12 STEM Education: Identifying Effective Approaches in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics" that highlights various STEM schools, the proposed research is highly relevant to current policy initiatives and debates. Moreover, the research has the potential to promote diversity in the STEM pipeline by influencing policymakers in states and districts that have yet to implement ISHSs at scale.

The aim of this project is to examine opportunity structures provided to students by inclusive STEM-focused high schools, with an emphasis on studying schools that serve students from underrepresented groups. In contrast to highly selective STEM-focused schools that target students who are already identified as gifted and talented in STEM, inclusive STEM-focused high schools aim to develop new sources of STEM talent, particularly among underrepresented minority students, to improve workforce development and prepare STEM professionals. A new NRC report, Successful K-12 STEM Education (2011), identifies areas in which research on STEM-focused schools is most needed. The NRC report points out the importance of providing opportunities for groups that are underrepresented in the sciences, especially Blacks, Hispanics, and low-income students who disproportionately fall out of the high-achieving group in K-12 education. This project responds specifically to the call for research in the NRC report and provides systematic data to define and clarify the nature of such schools.

The project is studying inclusive STEM-focused high schools across the United States to determine what defines them. The research team initially identified ten candidate critical components that define STEM-focused high schools and is refining and further clarifying the critical components through the research study. The first phase of the study is focusing on 12 well-established and carefully planned schools with good reputations and strong community and business support, in order to capture the critical components as intended and implemented. Case studies of these high-functioning schools and a cross-case analysis using a set of instruments for gauging STEM design and implementation are contributing toward building a theory of action for such schools that can be applied more generally to STEM education. The second phase of the study involves selecting four school models for further study, focusing on student-level experiences and comparing student outcomes against comprehensive schools in the same district. Research questions being studied include: 1) Is there a core set of likely critical components shared by well-established, promising inclusive STEM-focused high schools? Do other components emerge from the study? 2) How are the critical components implemented in each school? 3) What are the contextual affordances and constraints that influence schools' designs, their implementation, and student outcomes? 4) How do student STEM outcomes in these schools compare with school district and state averages? 5) How do four promising such schools compare with matched comprehensive high schools within their respective school districts, and how are the critical components displayed? 6) From the points of view of students underrepresented in STEM fields, how do education experiences at the schools and their matched counterparts compare? And 7) How do student outcomes compare?

The research uses a multiple instrumental case study design in order to describe and compare similar phenomena. Schools as critical cases are being selected through a nomination process by experts, followed by screening and categorization according to key design dimensions. Data sources include school documents and public database information; a survey, followed by telephone interviews that probe for elaborated information, to provide a systematic overview of the candidate components; on-site visitations to each school provide data on classroom observations at the schools; interviews with students, teachers and administrators in focus groups; and discussions with critical members of the school community that provide unique opportunities to learn such as mentors, business leaders, and members of higher education community that provide outside of school learning experiences. The project is also gathering data on a variety of school-level student outcome indicators, and is tracking the likely STEM course trajectories for students, graduation rates, and college admission rates for students in the inclusive STEM-focused schools, as compared to other schools in the same jurisdiction. Analysis of the first phase of the study aims to develop rich descriptions that showcase characteristics of the schools, using axial and open coding, to determine a theory of action that illustrates interconnections among context, design, implementation, and outcome elements. Analysis of the second phase of the study involves similar processes on four levels: school, student, databases, and a synthesis of the three. Evaluation of the project consists of an internal advisory board and an external advisory board, both of which provide primarily formative feedback on research procedures.

Research findings, as well as case studies, records of instrument and rubric development and use, annual reports, and conference proposals and papers are being provided on a website, in order to provide an immediate and ongoing resource for education leaders, researchers and policymakers to learn about research on these schools and particular models. An effort is also being made to give voice to the experiences of high school students from the four pairs of high schools studied in the second phase of the study. Findings are also being disseminated by more traditional means, such as papers in peer-reviewed journals and conference presentations.