Striving to Advance Teacher Education in STEM

Mississippi State University, Mississippi State MS

Investigators

Abstract

This Noyce Capacity Building project at Mississippi State University (MSU) aims to build the knowledge, community, and partnerships needed to increase the number of students recruited into STEM teaching. It includes leadership of four MSU departments and the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District, as well as mentoring by the principle investigator of the University of Kentucky's Track 1 Noyce program. The project is designed to analyze recruitment strategies, barriers to program retention, teacher candidates' demographics, and the characteristics of STEM teachers who have remained in STEM classrooms. By leveraging partnerships, the project seeks to broaden recruitment efforts, align positive teaching messages across Mississippi and university courses, and develop mentoring for undergraduate students from engineering, math, and sciences interested in becoming math and science teachers. The partnerships have the potential to enable the project team to reach and recruit a broader group of students to pursue STEM teacher education. Through research with in-service STEM teachers, including MSU alumni and other high-performing teachers, the project seeks to evaluate programmatic components that contribute to retention in the STEM teacher profession. This project aims to increase the number of students recruited into STEM teaching, develop a Noyce Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends proposal, and contribute to the literature on effective recruitment and retention of STEM education students. The project intends to gather essential information on the successes and challenges faced in Mississippi, such as recruiting students into STEM education, retaining these students in STEM teacher education programs, and strengthening the partnerships of key stakeholder in STEM education. It is a collaborative Capacity Building project between MSU's Department of Curriculum, Instruction, and Special Education, College of Education, College of Arts and Sciences, and Department of Computer Science and Engineering, as well as Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District. The project is designed to benefit from a mentoring relationship with the existing University of Kentucky's Noyce Track 1 Scholarship and Stipends project. Coupling this effort with that of the University of Kentucky may strengthen the program, so that more undergraduate STEM majors gain licensure to teach mathematics, biology, chemistry, physics, and, computer science. This project will gather and analyze baseline data needed to understand how to foster recruitment and program retention that leads to STEM teacher certification, while enhancing existing partnerships to study policies, strategies, and programs for STEM education. New knowledge gained in Mississippi via this project may serve as a model for increasing STEM teacher education in southeastern universities, as well as in other universities across the nation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.