- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 2050108, 2050099, 2050249
- First Name Keith
- Last Name Hubbard
- Registration Faculty/Administrator/Other
- Discipline STEM Education (general)
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Keith Hubbard, Stephen F. Austin State University; Dana Franz, Mississippi State University; Jennifer Whitfield, Texas A&M University; Diana Outlaw, Mississippi State University
Need
This project fulfills two vital needs. First, the United State desperately needs highly qualified STEM educators to teach and stay in rural areas. This project focuses on how to prepare preservice teachers to thrive in rural areas, and the effects of those preparation attempts. Second, given the intensity of training Noyce scholars, most projects are not studying a large enough group of scholars to be able to meaningfully compare different educator preparatory experiences. This project undertakes a multi-year longitudinal study which includes students from 14 different institutions, allowing for robust reflection on the effects of educator preparation.
Research Questions
1. What features of EPPs are intended to prepare program completers for employment as a STEM teacher in rural schools? 2. How do these programmatic features impact the teacher candidates’ intentions? 3. How do these programmatic features impact the teacher candidates’ decisions? 4. In what ways do these features impact the teacher candidate’s decisions and long-term plans to persist at the same rural campus? 5. In what ways do these features impact the teacher candidate’s decisions to remain teaching STEM in (a) rural or (b) nonrural schools?
Approach
We employ 3 sequenced surveys of future-then-current STEM teacher, a collection of teaching artifacts and syllabi from all institutions, interviews of instructors across each EPP under consideration, and extensive member checking to ensure the quality of our data and analysis. We would like to be able to link particular educational choices related to consideration of ‘place’ with long-term choices of graduates of those programs.
Outcomes
This poster will focus primarily on how we went about designing the mixed methods data collection, how we went about keeping response rates high, and how other programs might optimize longitudinal research design given our experiences.
Broader Impacts
Within our specific project, we hope to better understand and inform the 14 partner institutions with regard to their attention to ‘place’ in the EPP and its long-term impact.We hope that this poster will have a broader impact in that it will foster discussions between Noyce personnel about how best to execute meaningful longitudinal studies.
