| NSF Org: |
DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education |
| Recipient: |
|
| Initial Amendment Date: | March 31, 2020 |
| Latest Amendment Date: | March 31, 2020 |
| Award Number: | 1935479 |
| Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
| Program Manager: |
Alexandra Medina-Borja
amedinab@nsf.gov (703)292-7557 DUE Division Of Undergraduate Education EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
| Start Date: | April 1, 2020 |
| End Date: | March 31, 2022 (Estimated) |
| Total Intended Award Amount: | $98,874.00 |
| Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $98,874.00 |
| Funds Obligated to Date: |
|
| History of Investigator: |
|
| Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
660 S MILL AVENUE STE 204 TEMPE AZ US 85281-3670 (480)965-5479 |
| Sponsor Congressional District: |
|
| Primary Place of Performance: |
Tempe AZ US 85281-6011 |
| Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
|
| Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
|
| Parent UEI: |
|
| NSF Program(s): | IUSE |
| Primary Program Source: |
|
| Program Reference Code(s): |
|
| Program Element Code(s): |
|
| Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
| Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by developing a vision for STEM education that will prepare students for emerging technical and societal challenges. This project will convene discussions to explore current and future contexts for STEM education. Building off these discussions, the project will envision models for future STEM education. The project will consider STEM education from a perspective that integrates foundational knowledge (to know), meta-knowledge (to act), and humanistic knowledge (to value). The investigators expect that this perspective will provide better alignment of STEM education with technical and societal challenges than a knowledge-centric education. The project focuses on two gaps in current STEM education models. The first is the gap between the need for students to learn STEM concepts and the need for them to develop the creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills needed for ethical decision-making and action. The second gap occurs because STEM courses and degree programs continue to reside within traditional STEM disciplinary boundaries, even as our most pressing problems require interdisciplinary work. The project's goal is to collaboratively establish a vision for the future of STEM education and develop a well-articulated framework that describes this future.
This project will build a virtual community of practice that will meet in person to articulate a framework for the future of STEM education with potential to achieve the project vision. The pre-workshop activities will consist of a series of open internet-based discussions featuring invited expert keynotes. The objective of the discussion includes: (1) to build a community of practice; (2) to acquaint participants with the motivation, context, and key concepts of the workshop; and (3) to envision and converge on the curricular types, learner personas, and agenda for the workshop. Workshop participants will be selected from this community of practice, based on their expertise, knowledge, engagement, and leadership in the field. At the two-day, studio-format workshop, approximately 50 expert participants will engage in an iterative set of facilitated design-based exercises to develop prototype curricula. Following the workshop, the developed curricula will be openly available to the wider community of practice, with the aim of fostering an emergent network that will continue to collaboratively develop and iterate content and resources. If successful, the framework, curricula, and community of practice developed through this project has the potential to provide a pathway for evolving undergraduate STEM education to better meet rapidly emerging economic, environmental, and societal challenges.
The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. This project is within the Engaged Student Learning track, which supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The heart of the STEM Futures project was a week-long virtual design-studio workshop experience for faculty in STEM disciplines to collaboratively develop new programs and curriculum materials. The project was motivated by a widely held sense that we are underprepared at multiple levels for the economic, environmental, and societal disruptions that accompany the advance of global civilization and technology. Education programs and systems need to be reimagined to meet these challenges. STEM education is no exception.
The workshop was therefore designed to address this question: How might educators reimagine and redesign the content of undergraduate STEM curriculum at the university level to better meet the emergent challenges of the 21st century? An integrative framework organized participants' thinking about the future substance of STEM education into three broad categories—what we need to know, how we act on that knowledge, and the values we bring to our knowledge and action. Taking each in turn:
- Foundational Knowledge (To Know): The classic answer to the question: “What do learners need to know?” This includes core content knowledge, skills, and complex, ingrained mental processes specific to domains and disciplines.
- Meta-Knowledge (To Act): The skills, mindsets, and attitudes that address the process of working with foundational knowledge. Meta-knowledge enables learners to interpret information, make informed decisions, create and design new possibilities, work in collaborative teams, and convey ideas through multiple modalities—to turn knowledge into action.
- Humanistic Knowledge (To Value): These are the values that provide learners with vision and narrative of the self within a social context, from local to global scales. It is the foundation of ethical decision making, and includes life and job skills, cultural competence in a global context, as well as awareness of how the actions of the individual affects others, and the ability to assess those actions against a set of broader humanistic standards.
The three categories are complementary, supporting and informing one another; Meta-Knowledge acts on Foundational Knowledge, and is guided by Humanistic Knowledge.
The project had four stages: (1) Workshop participants were recruited and selected in August, 2020. (2) A series of four introductory webinars aligned with the framework were held in Sept., 2020, followed by (3) a week-long series of design sessions in early October, 2020, during which the participants worked collaboratively and iteratively within a scaffolded web-based environment to design their products. (4) Final products were submitted approximately two weeks after the end of the program.
Participants included 105 individuals, accepted from 179 applicants, formed into 25 teams. Most individuals applied as part of pre-formed teams, while others were placed into new or pre-formed teams after their acceptance. Participants represented 53 different institutions from 29 U.S. states. They were 65% female, and 32% persons of color or otherwise underrepresented minority. Participants were surveyed both before, during, and after the end of each step of the project, and these surveys were used formatively to tweak the design of the sessions.
Participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive (overall satisfaction averaged 9 on a 10-point scale), with a preponderance of participants seeing it as a valuable experience.
The final products of the workshop included a diverse and innovative set of curricular design products, including: 6 degree programs, 9 certificate programs, 7 efforts for courses, course components, or curricular alignments, and 3 training and professional development programs. These efforts spanned traditional disciplines such as Biology, Chemistry, Geology, Engineering, and the Health Sciences, as well as more interdisciplinary STEM programs. These diverse teams designed their materials for a broad array of audiences including STEM majors and non-majors, first-year students, disciplinary majors in upper-level courses, college faculty, preservice teachers, student leaders, and college STEM-bound high school students. Despite the range of content covered and audiences targeted by these different curricular designs, one thing stayed constant: the intentional, meaningful and contextually relevant integration of foundational, meta, and humanistic knowledge.
In Feb., 2022, about 18 months after the end of the workshop, we distributed a follow-up survey to track the longer term impacts of the program. Responses were received from 16 projects of 26 total projects that were developed by participant teams at the workshop. 11 of 16 indicated that they had done some work together after the project, beyond what was minimally required of all participants. This work included: implementation of at least part of their programs (5 teams); publication (2 teams); or submitting proposals based on the work (6 teams).
Last Modified: 11/07/2022
Modified by: Ariel D Anbar
Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.
