- Year 2018
- NSF Noyce Award # 1642182
- First Name William
- Last Name Hunter
- Discipline Other: Math and Science
- Co-PI(s)
Laura Bargewen, Barwegen Consulting Group, Inc., laura.barwegen@wheaton.edu
Charles R. Granger, University of Missouri St. Louis, grangerch@umsl.edu
Jessica S. Krim, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, jkrim@siue.edu
Monica Medina, IUPUI, mmedina@iupui.edu
Kim S. Nguyen, IUPUI, knguyen@iupui.edu
Nicolle VonDerHeyde, University of Missouri St. Louis, VonDerHeydeN@umsl.edu - Presenters
Jessica S. Krim, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville (jkrim@siue.edu); Kim S. Nguyen, IUPUI (knguyen@iupui.edu)
Need
The Midwest Noyce Connections project aims to connect and support grant personnel and scholars of 62 Noyce awards funded by the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship program across 15 states in the Midwest. The need for continuous professional development of Noyce project personnel and scholars is recognized by the National Science Foundation and the Midwest Noyce Connections project is to address a national need for highly qualified and professionally engaged communities of STEM teaching practitioners.
Goals
Specific goals of the project include: (1) increasing the personal and professional connections among Midwest Noyce project members and Noyce Scholars across the region and (2) enhancing the scholarship of teaching and learning among Noyce projects and scholars. Project goals will be accomplished through facilitating an annual regional Noyce conference in 2017, 2018, and 2019 in addition to a suite of year-round networking activities for Noyce project personnel and participants in the Midwestern region.
Approach
The Midwest Regional Robert Noyce Connections convened in 2017 has strengthened connections among funded Noyce projects in the Midwest region through expanding impact from the local areas influenced by the individual projects to a larger region throughout the Midwest. To enhance networking, the team attempted three innovations during the conference. Attendees indicated during registration which Mathematical Practice (MP) of the Common Core or the Science and Engineering Practice (SEP) of the Next Generation Science Standards they would like to work on. The participants were grouped together based upon their SEP/MP choice and sent into the St. Louis community to visit STEM-related sites to stimulate their thinking about lessons embedded in the local community. Following the conference, interested subgroups of practitioners attended a series of webinars that encouraged them to develop and design participant-initiated activities which would support the scholarship of teaching and learning
Outcomes
The 2017 Midwest Noyce Connections conference held in St. Louis, October 14-15, attracted 153 attendees. Among those 25 people participated in the weekly webinars between October 23 and November 13th, 2017. There were 6 proposals received funding for total requests of $31,000 for the participant-initiated activities. Of those six proposals, Noyce scholars on the five proposals were able to evidence of how they had already used ideas from the Annual Conference in their 10 respective classrooms in the subsequent months since the conference. Over 90% of conference participants who completed the post-conference survey agreed that this was an excellent conference. In addition to asking them to agree with a statement on a survey, data was also collected through two open-ended questions about the most and least outstanding aspects of the conference. Community-based site visit and personal/professional connections are the two highly rated by the conference participants.
Broader Impacts
The primary focus of this award is to enhance human resource development in the STEM disciplines. The positive results from the first year of this project implementation affirm the broader impacts of the Noyce Connections on innovative STEM content development and opportunities to share lessons learned and use lessons learned to impact the larger Noyce community. The project has a deeper impact in STEM learning in K-12 through providing continuing opportunities for the STEM educators to develop high quality evidence-based communities of practice in areas of high need.
