- Year 2017
- NSF Noyce Award # 1136366
- First Name Joanne
- Last Name Goodell
- Discipline Math
- Co-PI(s)
Debbie K. Jackson, Cleveland State University, d.jackson1@csuohio.edu
Nigamanth Sridhar, Cleveland State University, n.sridhar@csuohio.edu
John Holcomb, Cleveland State University, j.p.holcomb@csuohio.edu
Diane Corrigan, Cleveland State University, d.corrigan@csuohio.edu - Presenters
Joanne Goodell, Cleveland State University, j.goodell@csuohio.edu
Diane Corrigan, Cleveland State University, d.corrigan@csuohio.edu
Need
During the first few years or our Noyce project, we did not have a dedicated staff member responsible for marketing, recruitment and retention of our scholars, and we were not able to recruit our target number of fellows.
Goals
We hired a full time coordinator who made site visits to local HBCUs and targeted other avenues to recruit a strong pool of students from underrepresented groups. We were more successful in the recruitment phase, and this improved dramatically in the second year of targeted efforts. The coordinator also provided a lot of other academic and non-academic supports for the fellows throughout the year.
Approach
The MUST STEM Fellows program began by integrating the core outcomes of the Master of Urban Secondary Teaching (MUST) into the UTeach framework in order to focus more specifically on project-based instruction. While recruiting for MUST students has been relatively successful, program faculty wanted to increase the diversity of the cohort. Noyce funds have supported a full time student services coordinator who takes ownership of ensuring candidates have access to all available academic and non-academic supports throughout their entire time with the program, which could be over 2 years.
Outcomes
The support provided by the student services coordinator has proven invaluable to the recruitment, retention and graduation of our MUST STEM Fellows. Our graduation and retention numbers have increased significantly. CSU’s students are overwhelming low-income students who find it difficult to finance graduate education such as this full-time 15 month program. As well as financial support through the Noyce stipends, providing additional support services that help all of our students feel more connected to the cohort has resulted in much better outcomes for all students in MUST.
Broader Impacts
Increasing the number and diversity of teacher candidates in STEMM fields is an ongoing issue in teacher education in this country. We have shown some successes in recruiting and retaining minority students, but without some continuing sources of external funding to continue the coordinator position, especially as our state funding is dwindling every year, it will be very hard to maintain our momentum.
