Supporting Rural STEM Middle School Teachers and Career Counselors in the Development of Effective STEM Content and Career Development Experiences

Rural youth, in particular, have limited opportunities to gain exposure, develop interests, and broaden participation in the STEM workforce. While school counselors may have extensive training in career development, STEM teachers face many challenges effectively infusing career development into their instruction. This project will provide rural STEM middle school teachers and career counselors professional development and the support needed to collaborate with each other and local community assets in designing, integrating, and implementing effective STEM content and career development activities. Local teams will co-develop project-based learning units that incorporate a place-based education perspective involving STEM assets, careers, and stakeholders from the local communities for middle school rural youth that intentionally infuse STEM careers in their area with STEM content. Research aims of the study seek to explore the sense of job satisfaction, isolation, and impact to STEM practice experienced by rural teachers and counselors as a result of their collaboration in this professional development model as well as student STEM-relevant motivation, self-efficacy, and learning after participating in the units. This project will examine the feasibility, acceptability, and appropriateness of a collaborative teacher development model on both teacher and career counselor career development, as well as student outcomes. Sixty middle school teachers and 30 school counselors from 16 rural schools that serve over 6,000 students will participate in an intensive, multi-faceted, professional development experience involving collaboration and curricular development. Researchers will use surveys, interviews, and focus groups to examine the impact of their collaboration experiences on teacher and career counselor professional development and practice. Student outcomes will include teacher assessments of students' deeper learning (i.e., creativity, innovation, critical thinking), the impact of collaboration, and students' self-reports of their STEM motivation, STEM career interests, and self-efficacy. In addition to impacts on middle school student interest in STEM careers, the formal evaluation of the core model will allow the research team to develop information on promising processes for inclusive design. Examples of the learning experiences deemed to be of high impact in the contexts in which the projects are to be carried out, enabling others to successfully implement place-based career infused authentic STEM problem-based learning across diverse contexts. The Discovery Research preK-12 program (DRK-12) seeks to significantly enhance the learning and teaching of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) by preK-12 students and teachers, through research and development of innovative resources, models and tools. Projects in the DRK-12 program build on fundamental research in STEM education and prior research and development efforts that provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects. 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.