Collaborative Research: Get the Facts Out: Changing the Conversation around STEM Teacher Recruitment

American Association Of Physics Teachers, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

This Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) Development and Implementation project seeks to dispel misperceptions associated with being a teacher of physics, chemistry, and mathematics at the middle and high school level. Recent research in STEM teacher preparation has identified strongly held beliefs about the teaching profession, many of which are misperceptions. These misperceptions discourage STEM undergraduates from exploring teaching as a viable career option. Study results also suggest that many college and university faculty in STEM departments either do not mention middle or high school teaching as a career option or misrepresent the profession. Major misperceptions include inaccurate beliefs: (1) that the salary gap between teaching and private sector employment is very wide; and (2) about tangible and intangible benefits of the profession. This "Get the Facts Out" project has three aims. First, to change perceptions about the K-12 mathematical and physical sciences teaching professions among faculty, students, and parents. Second, to increase the frequency of faculty engaging in practices recommended in the Get the Facts Out toolkit. Third to increase the numbers of mathematics, chemistry, and physics majors who enroll in a teacher certification program. This project builds upon prior work, which includes the development of an instrument, Perceptions of Teaching as a Profession (PTaP), designed to probe STEM students' attitudes and beliefs about teaching, a set of interactive materials called "MythBusters," and a pilot study. Organizational partners include the Colorado School of Mines, the American Association of Physics Teachers, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, and the Mathematical Association of America, and several colleges and universities to serve as study sites. The societies aim to leverage their connections with disciplinary departments and engage change agents to implement a national campaign through interactive dissemination and support. The project intends to develop and refine a "Get the Facts Out" campaign toolkit to support local faculty champions in changing the conversation about STEM teaching careers in their departments. The toolkit, based on pilot interventions that show positive results in shifting perceptions among students and faculty, and which have been shown to outperform traditional recruitment efforts, will be designed to be customizable and adaptable to the local situation. The materials and strategies will include both student-facing and faculty-facing resources and a how-to guide for running interactive events, including but not limited to slide decks, clicker questions, and handouts with national survey data on retention, job satisfaction, and student loan forgiveness. In addition, sample informational handouts on teacher salaries, comparisons of teacher and faculty salaries, and retirement benefits, with instructions on how to customize these with local data. Finally, the project will create brochures and posters that incorporate tested messaging strategies, and 60-second narratives and single-sentence "bulleted messages" that can be used as conversation starters in emails or other resources designed by the implementer. After funding ends, it is anticipated that the campaign will be sustained by each society. To inform and improve national and local campaigns, this project intends to conduct research to understand which of the strategies in the "Get the Facts Out" toolkit are most effective, both in terms of impact on faculty and student perceptions and faculty uptake over time. For this study, large-scale quantitative data to provide statistically strong results will be examined and qualitative data designed to enable a deeper understanding of factors that influence outcomes will be gathered. To better understand the effect of faculty and student perceptions on student career choice, the project intends to look for correlations with department success in preparing mathematics and science teachers and with institutional, departmental and student characteristics. This unique project is designed to reach STEM majors in a large fraction of all U.S. mathematics, chemistry and physics departments and has potential to significantly address teacher shortages in these high-need STEM disciplines. The IUSE: EHR program is a core NSF undergraduate STEM education program that seeks to improve the effectiveness of undergraduate STEM education for both majors and non-majors, including the undergraduate preparation of K-12 STEM teachers. This project has the potential to speak boldly regarding misperceptions about teachers held by undergraduate STEM majors and the faculty who teach them and to ultimately impact career decisions of future middle and high school STEM teachers 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.