This award provides funding for a 3 year continuing award to support a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) in Engineering Site program at Washington State University (WSU) entitled, "Summer at WSU-Engineering Experiences for Teachers," under the direction of Dr. Richard Zollars.
This program is a renewal of a successful RET Site. A total of 36 in-service and pre-service middle and high school teachers (12 per year for three years) will participate in a six-week long summer institute during which they will work in the research laboratories of engineering faculty at WSU. The site activities will be focused in the area of bioengineering and will help integrate research in one of the most rapidly increasing areas of activity in engineering into the K-12 educational system.
This site program will have a broader impact on groups currently underrepresented in engineering. Long term relationships developed during this program via the teams of teachers, mentor's visits to schools, and/or the use of the materials developed during this program will insure that the RET program will have a lasting impact in the participating school districts.
There is concern about the low percentage of US students expressing an interest in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. In response to this concern the Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program was initiated by the National Science Foundation "… to involve middle and high school teachers and community college faculty in engineering research in order to bring knowledge of engineering and technological innovation to the classroom." Through the teacher’s involvement in the RET program, they increase their knowledge of engineering, see how science and mathematics concepts are used in engineering, and bring this knowledge of engineering to their students. The Summer at WSU – Engineering Experiences for Teachers (SWEET) program is an RET site grant. The SWEET program has middle school and high school science or mathematics teachers spend six weeks during the summer participating in bioengineering research in the engineering laboratories at Washington State University. An integral part of the SWEET program is that the teachers develop a learning module, based upon their summer experience, which they will use in their classrooms in subsequent years. The merit of this approach is that teachers are not only exposed to engineering concepts (and, through the teachers, their students as well) but also that they form relationships amongst themselves as well as with the engineering faculty. These relationships provide each teacher with multiple points of contact so that the engineering concepts they saw during the summer can be constantly refreshed. Thus the SWEET site addresses both the teacher preparedness and student pipeline issues in STEM education. The impact of the SWEET program is further broadened by its focus on recruiting teachers at schools with a higher than average percentage of students from groups that are underrepresented in engineering. The most recent RET grant was originally designed to host 12 teachers per year for three years. However, the SWEET program was actually able to accommodate 48 teachers over a four year period, with no increase in the budget. A previously funded RET activity hosted 39 teachers bringing the total number of teachers who have participated in the SWEET program to 87. These 87 teachers have developed 44 modules that are available to all teachers at the site http://eerc.wsu.edu/SWEET. Among the topics covered are biomechanics, bacterial adhesion, thermoregulation, microbial fuel cells, hydrogen fuel cells, microfluidics, ion selective electrodes for environmental monitoring, nanotechnology, rapid prototyping, chemical separations, lasers, and microwaves. In addition, 152 middle school and high school students have participated in the SWEET program through their involvement in a one-day event where they test the modules that the teachers have developed. In keeping with the desire to broaden the impact of the SWEET program, 37 of the 87 teachers that have participated have themselves been members of an underrepresented group in engineering as have over 50% of the middle school/high school students. In a further action to broaden the impact, the SWEET program has targeted certain schools for increased recruitment - schools with a higher than average percentage of students from groups that are underrepresented in engineering. As a result, the majority of the science/mathematics teachers at Sunnyside High School (85% Hispanic), Mabton High School (93% Hispanic), and Lapwai High School (88% Native American) have been participants in the SWEET program. Thus the legacy of the SWEET program will last for many years at these targeted schools. Participation in the SWEET program has had significant impacts on the participating teachers. Chris Baldus, a participant in 2010 and 2011 was named the Teacher of the Month in the eastern Washington, northern Idaho area in April, 2010 by a television station in Spokane, WA. Jessica Schultz used her experiences in the SWEET program in 2008 and 2010 as a basis for her Master’s degree in education from Montana State University in 2011.
