The Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) in collaboration with members of the STEM education community, and with support from this National Science Foundation grant, have created the Network of STEM Education Centers (NSEC). NSEC amplifies the work of STEM Education Centers (SECs) and supports the unique and powerful roles that centers play to improve undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education. 

What do STEM Education Centers (SECs) do?

SECs serve as the hubs of campus-based efforts to transform undergraduate STEM education. They are unique and powerful agents to address the calls for scaling and sustaining educational change to ensure that evidence-based, inclusive practices and programs that support student success in STEM are widely adopted across departments, colleges, and institutions. Based on research by Carlisle and Weaver (2018, 2020, and  in press), centers have four distinct campus roles. They centralize reform efforts and elevate the importance of STEM education. They use data to improve teaching and learning, provide expertise in educational research and measurement of interventions, and conduct discipline-based education research. They translate and communicate across boundaries of disciplines and across organizational levels, bridging the research to practice gap; and centers network/connect individuals with others working in similar areas and/or with resources/services.

Building a national Network of STEM Education Centers (NSEC)

We share here five outcomes and associated deliverables that resulted and that address the intellectual merit and broader impacts of this work.

1)      Built a learning, research, and implementation network for centers via conferences, workshops, communications, staff interactions, and an online platform.

• Formed a stable network boasting 213 centers and 170 institutions (from 293 SECs at 220 institutions in the United States identified to date).
• Advanced community and network learning via 9 national conferences with associated proceedings dating back to 2013. 
• Created common understanding and co-created resources via 9 workshops, ranging from center design to diversity equity and inclusion to teaching evaluation

2)      Showcased, celebrated, and studied the work of centers that are transforming undergraduate STEM education via case studies, research on center impacts, and center profiles.

• Created a taxonomy of center types and approaches via 135 center profiles and research studies. 

• Developed 12 institutional case studies and conducted a national survey of centers, which expanded our understanding of the capacities and roles of SECs and Centers for Teaching and Learning, and which resulted in three peer-reviewed research articles published and in progress (Carlisle and Weaver 2018, 2020, and in press), a Model for Center Practices in Undergraduate STEM Education, a white paper, and Guidebook for self-assessment for centers (in draft). 

• Expanded the scholarship on creating effective STEM education networks by drawing from a series of case studies (Goldstein et al 2017) and dialogues with network leaders (Goldstein 2021f), which provided 27 actionable steps for building and sustaining a national network (Goldstein 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d, 2021e), Guidance for Network Leaders (Desmarais et al 2017), and which has been further translated for netweavers at the Netweaving Network Platform.

3)      Served as a resource and catalyst for centers, policy-makers, funders, administrators, and the public on what works in STEM education via a national online platform of effective practices and programs, and research on effective center and institutional practices.

• Scaled innovative and promising practices by sharing practices and resources via an online platform, listserv, and national conference proceedings.

• Developed a toolkit for centers that include key resources of interest to centers, including governance, finance, and communication strategies; several dozen promising practices in a STEM innovation database; and report and inventory of state-wide STEM networks. 

• Publications (all publicly available versions) produced as part of this grant: (Horii et al 2017; Henderson et al 2017a, 2017b; Magliaro and Ernst 2018; Krim et al 2019; Carlisle and Weaver 2018, 2020; Redd and Finkelstein 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020; Desmarais et al 2017; Goldstein et al 2016; Goldstein et al 2017; Goldstein 2017, 2021a, 2021b, 2021c, 2021d, 2021e, 2021f)

4)      Created a coalition of actors that are addressing and engaging in practices that are cross- and multi-institutional via seed grants for collaborative research and implementation proposals.

• Incubation of  4 new communities in STEM education: NC-FEW, STEM DBER Alliance, CARET, and RECCUSE.

5)      Collectively improved institutional and national policies which strengthen undergraduate STEM education through participation in national dialogues.

• We have coordinated and collaborated with other networks to advance STEM education, including with the AAU STEM Education Initiative, the Accelerating Systemic Change Network, the BayView Alliance, the National Academies, the POD Network, and the TEVal (teaching evaluation) coalition.
• We are drafting a summary of what NSEC learned about centers from the work led by Gabriela Weaver and Deborah Carlisle, what we learned about building and sustaining networks from Bruce Goldstein's scholarship, and insights from Kacy Redd and Noah Finkelstein, co-directors of NSEC (will be published here). 

Last Modified: 12/10/2021
Modified by: Kacy Redd