Increasing the Value of Education for Secondary Teachers in STEM

This project aims to serve the national need for preparing and retaining highly qualified secondary science and mathematics teachers who are prepared to teach in high-need rural school districts. An underlying aim of the project is to build pathways from community colleges to a four-year STEM degree and teaching licensure. The project will provide scholarships and academic and co-curricular support to twenty (20) talented undergraduate students who are majoring in biology, chemistry, mathematics, or physics and are committed to a STEM teaching career. Through mentoring and community building, the project will support students as they complete their associate’s and bachelor’s degrees and, after graduation, enter the teaching profession. Teacher preparation and induction will emphasize strong content and pedagogical knowledge and will target development of cultural competencies. This will enable high-need schools in rural Virginia and other areas nationwide to provide their K-12 students a strong and inclusive science and mathematics education. This, in turn, will help prepare many of these same students for the STEM workforce. This project at Longwood University includes partnerships with Patrick and Henry Community College, Virginia Western Community College, and local educational agencies in Prince Edward, Henry, and Franklin counties in Virginia. The project will be guided by several goals. The first goal is to establish a cross-institutional team of faculty and staff members committed to recruiting undergraduate STEM majors and preparing them to become certified teachers. Second, over the five-year duration of the project, the investigators will recruit and provide financial and enhanced programmatic support to twenty (20) high-quality undergraduate STEM majors, of whom approximately 75% will be community college transfers, to prepare them to teach biology, chemistry, mathematics, or physics in high-need rural schools. Using a grow-your-own approach of recruiting students from their local areas and later placing them as STEM teachers in these same areas, the project will address critical teacher shortages in rural Southside and Southwest Virginia. Project support for teacher preparation and induction will include implementing high-impact practices such as enhanced faculty and peer mentoring, a summer bridge experience, cohort building, and a professional community of practice. For a third goal, the project will foster comprehensive, mixed methods formative and summative evaluation to: (1) provide assessment and feedback for adaptive project management and implementation and (2) generate evidence-based new knowledge for recruiting, supporting, preparing, and retaining community college and other students to become successful, culturally competent STEM teachers in high-need rural schools. In concert with this, the collaborative partnership will strengthen Longwood University's ongoing efforts to increase the number of students from traditionally marginalized groups in local schools who pursue careers in STEM fields. A fourth goal is to disseminate outcomes and lessons learned through peer-reviewed publications and state, regional, and national conferences. In turn, this will promote an ongoing national need to recruit and retain more STEM teachers who will serve rural communities. This Track 1: Scholarships and Stipends project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts. It also supports research on the effectiveness and retention of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts. 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.