NSF's Education and Human Resources Directorate seeks to significantly enhance its support for research, development, implementation, and assessment to improve STEM education at the Nation's two-year colleges. NSF encourages bold, potentially transformative projects that address immediate challenges facing STEM education at two-year colleges and/or anticipate new structures and functions of the STEM learning and teaching enterprise. This program description is a targeted approach for advancing innovative and evidence-based practices in undergraduate STEM education at two-year colleges. It also seeks to support systemic approaches to advance inclusive and equitable STEM education practices.
Projects will be expected to build on prior fundamental and/or applied research in STEM education and provide theoretical and empirical justification for proposed projects as needed. Projects will also be expected to be research-informed and to result in field-tested outcomes and products that enhance STEM teaching and learning at two-year colleges.
Potential Outcomes of Interest: NSF is interested in projects with potential outcomes that include, but are not limited to
- making systemic improvements in STEM education
- promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion
- mitigating the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on two-year colleges
?Projects may focus on different time scales, from near-, to long-term challenges and opportunities, and can range from small, exploratory investigations to large, comprehensive projects.
None is available.
Potential Approaches of Interest: Of particular interest are projects that aim to advance undergraduate STEM education by: improving student outcomes in foundational STEM courses; broadening and/or creating new STEM curricula; providing STEM students with authentic research experiences, internships, and other experiential learning opportunities; increasing access to high quality STEM education through new technologies; re- or up-skilling incumbent workers for new STEM jobs; building STEM career and seamless transfer pathways; developing novel mechanisms to identify talent and recruit into STEM programs. In all cases, NSF is interested in projects that include substantive public and private partnerships that contribute towards advancing STEM education.