The Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program's annual Learning Network Conference (LNC) brings together teams of STEM faculty, education faculty, K-12 teachers and administrators, and evaluators and researchers from current MSP projects for active participation, community building, and sharing of scholarship related to MSP projects. This project is collaborating both with MSP program staff and with a planning committee comprised of leaders of MSP projects across the program's portfolio, to plan and organize the January, 2011, conference. The project is advancing the intellectual content of the conference by forming a coherent subset of papers presented at the conference into a special issue of a STEM education journal. The project has two primary outcomes. First, it is designing and structuring LNC activities to foster greater collaboration and sharing among and beyond MSP projects at a national level. Second, it is guiding the process of developing the conference theme and strands, and the abstract review process, to engender an intellectual environment similar to a research conference. The project evaluation is assessing links between conference participants' attitudes and experiences in relation to the goals of the conference and to the five key features of the MSP program, and is analyzing the alignment of the conference abstracts with the MSP key features and the conference strands. The project evaluation is also analyzing interviews with individuals involved in the planning and implementation process to assess the quality and value of the project.
The purpose of this grant was to fund the organization of the 2011 Math Science Partnerships Learning Network Conference. Held January 23-25, 2011 in Washington, D.C., the conference attracts teams of participants from nearly all active MSP grants. Teams for most grants are comprised of the Principle Investigator, Project Manager/Director, K-12 Representative, Evaluator, and one other person. While the population of conference attendees is fairly diverse, all share a common goal of improving student success in STEM disciplines. A core organizational committee at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln consulted closely with MSP program officers at NSF throughout the planning process. One of the first actions was to recruit a planning committee from among the MSP community. Members of the planning committee were balanced to reflect both the MSP community and the types of active grants. Together, the planning and organizing committees worked with NSF MSP program officers to create the conference theme of the LNC: "MSP: From Partnerships of Innovation to Student Success." The committees solicited and reviewed presentation abstracts from MSP projects. The committees worked closely with NSF program officers to develop the LNC agenda, including the overall schedule and details of the plenary, paper, and other activity sessions. We carefully planned activities to meet the needs of the MSP community while remaining consonant with the LNC theme and strands. We found that enabling MSP project teams to consider their own operational definitions of student success and how such success would be determined by their MSP was a very valuable activity. The organizing committee analyzed all of the presentation abstracts to look for common themes. We learned there is a great deal of complexity in the landscape of research attempting to connect educational innovations to student success, including complex perspectives on innovations and success. Categories of complexity include: 1. Complexity of study design: Research designs that attempt to study complexities must make decisions about what to study and how to learn about the impacts of interventions on student success. 2. Complex professional development approaches: Innovative approaches to professional development can include organizing through principles that incorporate content, pedagogy, and leadership in coherent and complex ways. 3. Complexities inherent in studying practice: Examining classroom practice provides opportunities to study student success as teaching and learning processes occur. 4. Complex contexts: Contextual matters, such as children's beliefs and conditions in schools, also influence student success. 5. Complexities in ownership of learning from the work: The lenses teachers bring to defining student success and studying their own practice can contribute toward understanding the ways in which student success is influenced by partnership efforts. The MSP community is having positive impact on student success in STEM disciplines (Yin, 2012). However, definitions of student success are much more complex and nuanced than narrower definitions based on achievement test scores used by No Child Left Behind. It requires sophisticated research designs to measure nuanced definitions of student success. K-12 and higher education institutions must continue to work together to increase student success and to document and evaluate their efforts. It is critically important for well-designed research studies to elucidate what occurs in the black box between teacher professional development and student success, so that the research can inform policy. In order to disseminate MSP findings beyond the MSP community, following the January 2011 LNC, we submitted a proposal to the American Educational Research Association (AERA) to present a symposium of LNC papers at the 2012 AERA annual meeting. The symposium proposal was accepted, and held April 14, 2012 in Vancouver, British Columbia. The symposium included presentations from four different MSPs, as well as a presentation of the organizing committee’s analysis.
