Rutgers University will provide a comprehensive project in molecular biology and bioinformatics that engages high school teachers and students in DNA sequencing research. More than 75 teachers will participate in the project and approximately 30 students per year will attend the summer program and 300 additional students will engage in the Project during each academic year.

The goal of this ITEST scale-up project (ITSI-SU) is to address the need for research-based science materials and teaching techniques that generate demonstrable improvements in student science achievement in grades 3-12. The project will reach 264 teachers directly and 10,000 students in four states and has the capacity to reach another 1,500 teachers and 50,000 students nationwide in a dissemination phase, and still more if teachers and trainers adopt project-generated resources.

This collaborative project is conducting a research study to delineate the effective components of mentoring for underrepresented and non-underrepresented students in STEM, utilizing a robotics educational program. To understand STEM expectations of success and interests in pursuing STEM careers, it is imperative to understand the achievement-related choices people make when deciding what areas to study and what careers to pursue.

This study by Worcester Polytechnic Institute will ascertain how well "disengagement" of students in mathematics can be determined from math learning software and how well it predicts later outcomes of STEM learning and career advancement. The study will use with metrics automatically extracted from a computer-based math learning tool in middle school to predict STEM workforce participation after high school.

This project investigates the relationship between middle school students’ information technology skills, their success in an inquiry ocean science curriculum designed to target those skills, and their understanding of the new characteristics of 21st century science. It is concerned with the design of a curriculum and its impact on students of high compared with low digital literacy.

The Real World Externships project provides professional development for 150 mathematics and science teachers in grades 7-12 in Iowa. The teachers participate in externships with local science-based industries for six weeks during the summer. Teachers learn current applications of science and mathematics that they can use to enhance their teaching.

Society's Grand Challenges for Engineering (GCE) is the backdrop of this particular project as it works to develop socially-relevant engineering curricular modules for middle school instruction in STEM. The project team at the University of Wisconsin-Madison consists of engineering and education faculty, along with 23 middle school teachers and guidance counselors from 5 rural and urban public schools who are collaborating to design and test curricular modules and career exploration activities.

This project will enable high school and middle school STEM teachers and students to conduct environmental research aided by the analysis of images from digital cameras, scanners, and the Internet. The project explores how digital image analysis can be applied to environmental quality issues that can readily be introduced into STEM courses, engaging students and encouraging them to think about related careers. The project will develop research agendas that will employ a variety of image analysis tools.

The Bio-ITEST program is a model designed to provide secondary science teachers with the knowledge, skills, and resource materials to engage their students in the newly developing fields of bioinformatics and computational biology, ensuring that students will be able to participate in these important new workforce areas.