NSF Funds College-Middle School Collaborations
Middle school science teachers in five New Hampshire and Vermont school districts will, starting this autumn, be getting some classroom help from STEM graduate students at Dartmouth College. The college recently received a five-year, $2.5 million National Science Foundation (NSF) grant to help bring about collaborations between the grad students and teachers, Campus Technology reports. It quotes the NSF as saying the grants should help the grad students “acquire value-added skills,” including the ability to communicate STEM subjects to both technical and nontechnical audiences, and how best to enrich STEM learning and instruction at the K-12 level.
The principal investigator for the study is Carl Renshaw, a professor of earth sciences. Nancy Serrell, director of Dartmouth’s outreach office, told Campus Technology that another goal is to help excite the youngsters by letting them meet and work with burgeoning scientists. “One problem with getting kids interested in science is that, by middle school, they begin seeing it as a boring collection of facts to be memorized.”
Filed under: K-12 Education News
