STEM Teacher Education Program Review

Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Through the "STEM Teacher Education Program Review," the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation is developing a plan for studying the effectiveness, best practices, and change strategies of four graduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teacher education programs at four different universities - Purdue University, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI), Ball State University, and the University of Indianapolis. These four STEM teacher education programs have recently or are still undergoing radical changes, with their individual institutional evolutions still in the beginning stages. The changes these programs have committed to design and implement through the campus-specific processes now underway were a requirement for their eligibility to participate in the Woodrow Wilson Foundation's Indiana STEM Teaching Fellowship. By changing their STEM programs to meet a set of standards established by the Foundation, each of the universities became eligible to receive funding for 20 Woodrow Wilson Teaching Fellows every year for at least two years. Although each new program conforms to Woodrow Wilson standards, they each are using a different process to plan, adopt, and implement changes. This offers an immediate, urgent, and distinctive research opportunity - four STEM teacher education programs within the same state undergoing significant change simultaneously - for examining best practices in STEM teacher education and change strategies. Because the institutions have different missions and cultures (e.g., Purdue is a land-grant research university; IUPUI is an urban-serving university; the University of Indianapolis is a private institution; and Ball State University is a comprehensive public university which happens to have a residential specialized secondary school on the campus for talented high school students in math, science, and the humanities), variation across the four makes them as a group representative of a large proportion of the total 'universe' of teacher preparation programs in the United States. The project will set the stage for a comprehensive study of the effectiveness of these four different approaches to STEM teacher education. The evaluation, comparison, and documentation of the change process being undertaken by these universities will have intellectual merit in its own right, but also practical value by offering case studies for how very different institutions can create effective STEM teacher education programs.