Workshops to Increase Engineering Participation in the Noyce Program

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This project is planning and implementing several one-day workshops each year in conjunction with national and sectional meetings of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) for the purpose of encouraging engineering faculty to develop Noyce proposals. These workshops target engineering faculty who are inclined to consider submitting Noyce proposals, and help them to (1) develop sufficient understanding of working with K12 systems, and (2) learn enough about the Noyce program so that they can write Noyce proposals effectively. The workshops are designed in consultation with two engineering educators who have been highly involved in K12 education. A current, local Noyce PI and a Noyce scholar are involved in part of each workshop to provide an understanding of how a Noyce program works. The workshop program includes discussion of advance homework assigned to participants to learn about K12 licensure requirements from an education faculty member on their campus, discussion of examples of successful projects, information about the requirements for successful Noyce proposals, and guidance in how engineering faculty can work within their own home institutions to gain buy-in from stakeholders at their universities and to collaborate successfully with teacher education programs. Participants spend time during the workshops developing detailed outlines of viable Noyce proposals. The project maintains contact with workshop participants afterward through individual communications and a listserv of workshop participants. Each year, workshops are held in conjunction with the two national annual conferences sponsored by ASEE, and with 4 or 5 sectional meetings. Linking the workshops with both regional and national ASEE meetings is designed to impact a wide geographic distribution of participants, with the intent of improving the geographic distribution of the Noyce portfolio and thereby reaching a broader audience of prospective K12 teachers. Because engineers are trained to approach STEM subjects from a problem solving orientation, the ultimate result of this effort is to increase the number of K12 STEM teachers whose pedagogical approach to teaching STEM subjects includes relevant examples from real world applications. The workshops are expected to reach 360 participants over three years. Formative assessment from workshop evaluations guides improvement and the numbers of new engineering-focused Noyce awards is being tracked.