- Year 2022
- NSF Noyce Award # 1950292
- First Name Li
- Last Name Feng
- Discipline Biological Sciences, Chemistry, Geosciences, Mathematics, Physics
- Presenters
Xiu Wu, Richard Vega, & Daniel Payan, Texas State University
Need
Tracking the impacts of Noyce Scholarship Program in the context of spatial-temporal dimensions in high-need school districts of the U.S is the key evidence to exhibit why and how the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program contributes to recruit and retain STEM teachers. By mapping out the dispersion of Noyce program, we will further understand how these Noyce programs can contribute to solve local teacher shortages and how STEM teachers are distributed across different regions and states.
Goals
1.When are the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship programs adopted and diffused across different regions and states?2.Where are the High-need Public School Districts distributed in the U.S?3.How does this Spatial-temporal distribution of the Noyce Scholarship program affect the distribution of STEM teachers in High-need Public School Districts?
Approach
We used three different databases (AAAS Noyce database, NSF award database, and Common Core of Data) in compiling an integrated databases of all Noyce institutions that have received any NSF Noyce funding. We also use the recent Education Demographic and Geographic Estimates (EDGE) Program to geocode the Noyce Institution. We are testing the spatial mismatch theory to see if the location of the Noyce Institutions is optimally located where these high-needs public school districts are located.
Outcomes
We will present the Noyce program establishment over last twenty years. We found that top three states of Noyce program are California, New York, and Texas. We also noticed that high-needs public school districts are often located in the southern states such as Mississippi, Florida, Georgia, and Texas. Noyce program awarded the greatest number of awards in 2008, 2017, and 2020. We use both empirically based geographical distance between Noyce program and school district partners and a flexible distance based on prior literature (5–30-mile radius) to calculate the match and mismatch of the Noyce program and high-need school districts.
Broader Impacts
This project aims to investigate how to build a reliable high-quality supply of STEM teachers for high-need school districts. This work will contribute to the national need for educating a robust and diverse STEM workforce. The project will analyze whether and, if so, how scholarships provided by the Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program help to alleviate STEM teacher shortages. The project seeks also to provide insights about how to create partnerships between local school districts and higher education institutions. The collaborating institutions are in two populous states, and together serve both rural and urban school districts and cover multiple STEM disciplines. This research has the potential to raise awareness of challenges STEM teachers face in high-need settings and to suggest policy solutions to address these challenges. In addition, the project will contribute to understanding the influence of the Noyce program on the STEM teacher workforce.
