This program prepares forty experienced doctoral-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate students and forty secondary STEM teachers to work in an interdisciplinary environment by developing novel Mathematics, Engineering, and Science Bridge Quartets (MESBQ), where a GK-12 Science or Engineering Fellow and a GK-12 Mathematics Fellow will partner with corresponding in-service science and mathematics teachers. The cohorts will form during a series of summer institutes, where the research knowledge of the Fellows will be disseminated to the teachers, training in pedagogy and learning theory will occur for the Fellows, and integrated STEM curriculum modules will be developed. The focus of the MESBQ project is to enrich the education of STEM doctoral students, to develop a novel curricular approach to mathematics and science instruction, to build integrated math/science communities within and between higher education and K-12 institutions, and to enhance the mathematics and science content knowledge of teacher participants.
More broadly, the STEM graduate students will gain an appreciation for the interconnectedness of the STEM disciplines in research. The teachers will develop an enhanced understanding of the relationship of math and science in their teaching. The K-12 students will benefit through the development of new inquiry-based integrated curriculum modules. Fellows from underrepresented groups will be recruited and an emphasis will be placed on working with teachers from schools with underserved populations. Results will be disseminated nationally through a capstone conference and a model developed that can be replicated across the nation.
The main goal of Texas Tech University’s "Building Bridges: Integrating Mathematics, Engineering, and Science on the South Plains" GK-12 program has been the development of deep thinking about the integration of mathematics, science, and engineering in graduate research and in the K-12 environment by STEM GK-12 Graduate Fellows. This has been accomplished by the development of "Math/Engineering/Science Bridge Quartets (MESBQ’s)", where a scientist (engineer) Graduate Fellow and high school science Teacher Fellow pairs with a math Graduate Fellow and a corresponding math Teacher Fellow at the same school (or, later in the program, through distance-based cohorts at various schools in Texas) to develop learning/teaching cohorts. The "Building Bridges: Integrating Mathematics, Engineering, and Science on the South Plains" program at Texas Tech University has been unique within the National Science Foundation’s GK-12 program due to its interdisciplinary nature. Besides integrating math and science/engineering, a secondary goal at Texas Tech has been to prepare graduate-level STEM researchers and in-service secondary mathematics and science teachers to thrive in an interdisciplinary environment. The organization of the program at TTU was designed to 1) facilitate the research activities of the GK-12 Graduate Fellows, 2) develop professional experiences for both Graduate and Teacher Fellows, while creating a sense of community among STEM participants, 3) encourage collaborative design and implementation of an integrated curriculum, and 4) create cyber-capable dissemination platforms for nationwide outreach through a distance-learning classroom environment. The Graduate Fellows improved their abilities in communicating their research interests and skills to a broad audience and learned pedagogical skills from their interactions with the Teachers. This initiative attempted to provide a cognitive bridge between math and science for high school students. In an innovative part of the program, math Graduate Fellows were placed in the K-12 science classrooms, while the science and engineering Fellows were put into the math classroom. This allowed the Graduate Fellows to help answer questions such as, "What is what we are learning in math (science) class good for?" and "Why do I need to know this?" These are questions that often plague STEM classes. The program allowed the STEM Graduate Fellows to provide relevant mathematics of use in high school science and engineering courses and relevant scientific or engineering examples of the use of various math concepts. The MESB cohorts were initiated each year through a week-long summer institute where the Graduate Fellows and Teacher Fellows began cohort development, began to understand of the relationship of the graduate students in the K-12 classroom, learned advanced teaching and presenting skills, and started the construction of the integrated STEM learning modules. This process continued throughout each academic year, with week-long modules being deployed in the spring (see attached figures). The Fellows spent 10 hours per week in class and up to 5 hours per week in preparation (including weekly meetings with the Teachers and monthly meetings with the PI team). In addition, the Graduate Fellows participated in a STEM seminar each fall that required them to learn how to present the results of their research to a scientifically literate but general audience, in order to improve their communication skills. In summary, 55 total (41 unique) graduate students were hired in the Texas Tech Building Bridges GK-12 program, of which 38 total (28 unique), representing 69% of the total population, were from under-represented minorities in the STEM disciplines. Over the five years of the grant (plus one-year grant extension), 64 STEM presentations (18 associated with GK-12 activities) and 37 research articles were published in peer-reviewed journals by the Graduate Fellows. In the last summer of the grant, a national capstone conference was held that engaged approximately 70 students, faculty and STEM researchers from around the country in discussions concerning various inquiry-based learning constructs as well as actually allowing them to participate in a sampling of some of the more than 40 integrated modules developed by the MESB cohorts.
