This project addresses access to STEM educational experiences for rural students. Students from rural areas and small towns make up about 30% of the U.S. secondary school population but often lack inspirational STEM educational opportunities and experiences. This makes them less likely to pursue STEM majors in college, which is a potential loss of human talent in STEM innovation.

The project will introduce and investigate an innovative model for using authentic community-relevant research to deepen students' STEM knowledge and skills, while building strong community connections between Maine's coastal school districts and their communities. The project will involve teachers and administrators, STEM and STEM education faculty, and business leaders and other community members in a research practice partnership.

This project will host a workshop in order to identify and synthesize research findings from NSF awards that addressed the unanticipated effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on STEM teaching and learning. The interruptions from the pandemic had dramatic, widespread effects in education. Across the nation, teachers, students, parents, staff, and school administrators experienced extended school closures and a rapid and unexpected shift to virtual instruction.

The Morehouse College's Innovative Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Work Force Development Project will engage minority male students in an active, inclusive learning community to enhance their interest in science and mathematics education and careers. The objective of the project is to shift from passive learning to active learning within the context of real-life problem-solving scenarios in order to promote academic success in middle school and high school and prepare students academically to attend a college or university.

Across the nation, teachers have shifted to delivering instruction remotely due to COVID-19. This transition to remote instruction has presented challenges for secondary science teachers who previously engaged their students in hands-on learning through empirical tests and observations of real-world phenomena, but whose students might not now have the equipment or materials in their homes to enable hands-on investigations.

This project will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase student motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by developing and testing a middle school science curriculum focusing on water and water-related career awareness.

The aim of this project will be to help school students, particularly under-represented minorities and females, to access careers in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM).  The strategy will be to study a demonstrated successful learning model that integrates traditional high school STEM curriculum with real world projects from the STEM business community. The study will illuminate how the components of the program work together to support students' motivation and preparation for STEM careers, in particular female and minority students.