NSF supported STEM disciplines: Mathematics, Computational Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology
The project will engage graduate fellows with middle school science teachers from the Middle School Science Academy (MSSA) to enhance the professional development of the fellows and associated teachers through activities involving Scientific Inquiry, multi-disciplinary physical science, and life sciences focusing on evolution. The Kansas Partnership for Graduate Fellows will provide middle school instructional experiences in urban Kansas school districts for science, mathematics and engineering graduate students. The goal of the Kansas Partnership project is to assist graduate students to be better communicators of their science with K-12 teachers and students in particular and with the broader community of non-scientists in general. The specific anticipated outcomes of this project are to: provide highly qualified Ph.D. candidates in engineering and science with a unique opportunity for professional growth through the development of their teaching and learning skills; foster the incorporation of additional hands-on science experiences and cooperative learning strategies into middle school classrooms; establish a sustainable outreach partnership among the partner school districts that will provide a vehicle for interpreting the significance of science and engineering, and; contribute to improving the science achievement of at-risk middle school students in two of the largest urban school districts in Kansas. Intellectual Merit of the project addresses removal of barriers to student engagement in science and engineering through innovative content delivery using active learning strategies and science research activities based on National and State curriculum standards for grades 6-9. The institutionalization of the professional development courses, the interaction with the Uplink program and the continued commitment of the Centers to maintain their partnership with the districts will ensure the sustainability and broader impact of the program.
The Kansas Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education (GK-12) Program provided fellowships to 34 science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) graduate students to support their growth in communication skill, expanding their preparation for professional and scientific careers in the 21st century. The University of Kansas program is designed to recognize that in addition to being a competent researcher, STEM graduate students must learn to communicate their work and the value of their work to a wide variety of audiences. The graduate students bring their cutting-edge research ideas and science and engineering practices to middle and high school classrooms; mentoring student’s project-based work. In professional development session the Graduate Fellows learned through these school experiences, the skills which better enable them to explain science and engineering to people of all ages. The focus of the instructional program is for the graduate students to be scientist/engineering mentors. The graduate fellows were working with the mentor teachers to help students do meaningful, authentic, scientific research projects from a Project Based Learning Curriculum model. The belief of the program is that the way students are spoon feed by providing them with knowledge without requiring that they actively pursue that knowledge has proven to be relatively ineffective; particularly with these young learners. The traditional instructional approach in these schools concentrates on teaching factual knowledge, with the implicit assumption that expert-like ways of thinking about the subject are already present however, this is not what cognitive science tells us. It tells us instead that students need to develop these different ways of thinking by means of extended, focused mental effort. Extended mental effort is not something that this student population has experience with and is a difficult skill for many of these learners to acquire. New ways of thinking are always built on the prior thinking of the individual, so if the educational process is to be successful, it is essential to take that prior thinking into account. Everything that constitutes "understanding" science and "thinking scientifically" resides in the long-term memory, which is developed via the construction and assembly of component proteins. So a person who does not go through this extended mental construction process simply cannot achieve mastery of a subject, as clearly illustrated by this student populati This approach to project-based research proved to be very successful. We have illuminated a significant combination of variables leading to successful research by the secondary students. These variables include: 1) the enhances weekly training of the graduate students on mentoring research and a deeper understanding of learning outcomes, 2) the UKanTeach STEM Teacher Preparation program that prepared classroom teachers who have both their own undergraduate research experience and significant preparation for a project-based learning classroom, and 3) a school structure that allowed for students to work on extended research projects. This combination is best illustrated by a video that was produced for the National Science Teachers Association national meeting. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fc8iJqi8RSI This is one of three successful research collaborations. This particular project has submitted two papers that have been submitted for publication by research journals and two scientific conference presentation. In all three cases of successful projects, students (and their teacher) continued their work beyond the school year, spending time in the KU research lab of their collaborators during the summer, completing their research and working on the publications.
