This Learning and Research Center will advance efforts of the Innovative Technology Experiences for Students and Teachers (ITEST) program to better understand and promote practices that increase students' motivations and capacities to pursue careers in fields of science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM) by providing technical support to all ITEST projects, facilitating national dissemination of ITEST project outcomes, and further developing the ITEST research and development community.

Robotics and GPS/GIS in 4-H: Workforce Skills for the 21st Century is a-five year scale-up project to use 4-H clubs to prepare middle school youth for the STEM workplace. The project builds on and extends an existing research-based ITEST project by developing and testing new national curricula to introduce basic technology skills, foster problem solving and inquiry skills, and encourage teamwork.

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 Barcode of Life Initiative (BOLI) is an international biodiversity collaboration that creates a genetic encyclopedia of Earth's plants and animals using short DNA sequences that uniquely identify species groups. The goal of this strategies project is to interest students in STEM careers by engaging them in an international project to provide identification of biological species.

Tenth grade students in high schools in Nashville, Tennessee choose among four to seven career academies. Despite a needs analysis that demonstrates the several occupations in Nashville require a STEM background, the results of a survey show that most students are choosing arts and communications career academies rather than STEM-related ones.

This ITEST strategies project titled Classroom Student Investigations, uses the popularity of the Crime Scene Investigation television show, involving forensic science investigation, as a metaphor to train teachers in forensic science topics and use that training in their science classrooms to stimulate and encourage middle and upper school students in science topics generally. The project is expected to lead to increased student interest in STEM topics using students interest in the culturally popular portrayal of forensic science to convey many basic STEM principles.

The goals of "CSI: Creating Student Investigators" (formerly CSI: Arkansas) are twofold: to improve the science pedagogy (including the use of technology) employed by mid-South Delta region high school teachers and to improve science and technology learning by students with a concomitant increase in the number of students who enter post-secondary education, particularly those who chose STEM/IT career preparation. Workshops for teachers and students will be presented using forensic sciences as an integrating theme.