The University of Colorado at Boulder (CU Boulder) is partnering with Adams 12 Five Star Schools, Boulder Valley School District, Brighton 27J School District, and St. Vrain Valley School District to expand the current Noyce Fellowship Program and address growing needs by recruiting six new students per year over four years. The project seeks to increase the number of students traditionally underrepresented in mathematics and science at CU Boulder and the number of these students applying to the Noyce Fellowship program by engaging Noyce Fellows in local informal science education efforts through the Science Discovery program and Partners for Informal Science Education in the Community at CU Boulder. The project is conducting longitudinal studies of the effectiveness of the Noyce "treatment" on former Noyce Fellows' teaching and studies of upcoming transformations of the certification program available to the Phase II cohort. The Noyce Fellowship program is a part of a larger program at CU Boulder that couples large-enrollment undergraduate course transformation with the recruitment and preparation of future teachers through an Undergraduate Learning Assistant Program, which impacts over 7000 students per year and has engaged over 47 STEM faculty members in the process. This three-tiered research project investigates content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and practice of Noyce Fellows, Learning Assistants (LAs), former Noyce Fellows who are currently teaching in K-12 schools, and a control group of students who completed the same certification program but did not have the Noyce/LA treatment. When students become Noyce Fellows at CU Boulder, they become a part of a community that they will be a part of for many years to come. The Noyce Fellows participate in discipline-based educational research, present their research at national and local conferences, and mentor new Noyce Fellows. Noyce Fellows work closely with STEM and STEM Education faculty and learn how to investigate the impact of classroom innovations through research. The project is documenting and disseminating the program design, the supporting research results, and assessment instruments designed in the process to assist other universities interested in working toward large-scale institutional change in STEM education.
