The Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program seeks to enhance student achievement in STEM areas by creating new forms of leadership, enhancing teacher quality, and creating more challenging courses and programs of study in STEM areas. A special feature of the MSPs is drawing together new communities and collaborations to dialogue around issues of STEM education and develop new approaches for enhancing K-12 learning pathways. As MSP researchers have examined the progress of the MSP projects, an emergent area of interest has been the study of the new networks that comprise these evolving collaborations.
The purpose of the conference is to bring together members of the MSP community and other researchers outside this community who have used Social Network Analysis (SNA) to document results of social interventions. Participants will discuss how they have used SNA and what has been learned through the approach, and they will further explore the utility of SNA as a research tool for enhancing what is being learned through NSF's investment in MSP projects. Of particular interest is revealing the various types of research questions to which the technique has been applied, how it has been combined with other methodologies, what has been found, and what are the perceived strengths and weaknesses. A portion of the conference is devoted to considerations of different analytic approaches to summarizing the data and, relatedly, the kinds of software packages that have been developed to carry out the analyses.
The conference brings together researchers and evaluators interested in the SNA approach to learn more about applications of the methodology and available analytic tools, and also challenges participants to think about concrete ways in which SNA approaches can be applied to ongoing and new MSPs. A set of papers documents the results of this conference and suggest areas of research that MSPs might wish to pursue.
