- Year 2024
- NSF Noyce Award # 1950292
- First Name Li
- Last Name Feng
- Registration Faculty/Administrator/Other
- Discipline Data Science, Other:geography, STEM Education (general)
- Role Principal Investigator (PI)
- Presenters
Li Feng, Xiu Wu, and Yao-Yu Chih, Texas State University
Need
The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (‘Noyce’) aims to provide financial support to higher education institutions, enabling them to provide scholarships, stipends, curriculum, and programming to recruit and train STEM majors and professionals to become teachers in high-need school districts. The Noyce Program has been implemented over the past twenty years and produces over 12,000 Noyce scholars across the country. We are interested in the implementation of the Noyce program across the nation and identifying the areas where the Noyce program should be invested and prioritized.
Research Questions
We are interested in investigating where the Noyce programs are generally located. Are there regional clusters of Noyce program? Do we observe some states or counties have more or fewer Noyce programs? Do high-need/high-poverty school districts tend to have more Noyce programs? Are there regional variations in terms of this relationship?
Approach
This research utilizes Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) to identify the most important educational factors within the defined treatment radius of the Noyce program. First, we define the outcome of interests as the presence of Noyce program within 10-mile radius, 25-mile radius, 50-mile radius, and out of 50 miles. After that, we include school district characteristics such as share of students eligible for Free or Reduced Lunch program and school district revenue as the regressors.
Outcomes
The benefits of GWR methodology are its ability to allow local variation in regression coefficients across space, where each local regression is weighted by the observations surrounding a specific location. We find that there are some regional clustering effects. We also discovered that there are spatial variations in terms of where the Noyce programs are located.
Broader Impacts
Our study will provide insights into Noyce policy and planning decisions. It will help teachers, school administrators, and policymakers to examine the spatial inequities in terms of access to high quality STEM teachers. Our study will also help improve the accessibility of the Noyce Program in rural, marginalized, and disadvantaged areas.
