Identifying and disseminating transformative professional development of STEM undergraduates who perform outreach: Progress in year 1

Michael Alley, Joanna K. Garner

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

1 Scopus citations

Abstract

To teach STEM content to K-12 students and to recruit talented and diverse K-12 students into STEM, many outreach programs at universities in the United States rely on STEM undergraduates. While the design of such outreach typically focuses on the K-12 students who are taught or recruited, an important but often overlooked consideration is the effect of the outreach on the professional development of the STEM undergraduates themselves. Our NSF EAGER project is determining which outreach programs in the United States provided the most transformative professional development of the participating STEM undergraduates. This project then is capturing the essence what practices in those programs provided transformative professional development. Next, the project is disseminating these practices to a network of institutions doing outreach. Supporting this project is the NSF EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) program. In this first year of the project, we performed a review of literature and university websites with follow-up survey data to identify outreach programs that may be transformative for STEM undergraduates. This review yielded a matrix of about 100 college-based outreach programs. We then invited these programs to attend one of the following workshops: a March workshop held at Tufts University in Boston or an April workshop held at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Nine institutions sent representatives to the Boston workshop, and five institutions sent representatives to the Lincoln workshop. In addition, we held conference calls to gather information from an additional six institutions. The purpose of the workshops and conference calls was two-fold: (1) determine best practices for outreach that used STEM undergraduates, and (2) determine what in those programs provided the most transformative development of the participating STEM undergraduates. This paper presents the main tasks accomplished in these workshops and conference calls.

Original languageEnglish (US)
JournalASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings
StatePublished - Jun 15 2019
Event126th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition: Charged Up for the Next 125 Years, ASEE 2019 - Tampa, United States
Duration: Jun 15 2019Jun 19 2019

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • General Engineering

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