- Year 2019
- NSF Award #1439789
- Registration Former Noyce Scholar
- First Name Amanda
- Last Name Jensen
- Discipline Biology, Chemistry, Math, Physics
- Institution South Dakota State University
Abstract
One of the successes of the Rural Enhancement of Mathematics And Science Teachers (REMAST) Scholarship Program at South Dakota State University is the community we have built. This community has been built through a summer conference and a closed Facebook group. As we near the end of our Phase II Noyce funding, we are using social network analysis to examine the connections within the REMAST Facebook group. What we learn in this research project will be useful to other Noyce projects as it is a model for developing a strong professional learning community. In order to determine information about the connections within the group of alumni and scholars, we created adjacency matrices based on cohort numbers. From these adjacency matrices, we used the software programs Gephi and MATLAB to generate data and to create images that illustrate friendships between group members. Looking at the images, we made conjectures about the Facebook group and analyzed these conjectures using various attributes of the data, such as degrees, eigenvector centralities, triangles, and complete subgraphs.
