The 2011 Learning Network Conference

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The Math and Science Partnership (MSP) program's annual Learning Network Conference (LNC) brings together teams of STEM faculty, education faculty, K-12 teachers and administrators, and evaluators and researchers from current MSP projects for active participation, community building, and sharing of scholarship related to MSP projects. This project is collaborating both with MSP program staff and with a planning committee comprised of leaders of MSP projects across the program's portfolio, to plan and organize the January, 2011, conference. The project is advancing the intellectual content of the conference by forming a coherent subset of papers presented at the conference into a special issue of a STEM education journal. The project has two primary outcomes. First, it is designing and structuring LNC activities to foster greater collaboration and sharing among and beyond MSP projects at a national level. Second, it is guiding the process of developing the conference theme and strands, and the abstract review process, to engender an intellectual environment similar to a research conference. The project evaluation is assessing links between conference participants' attitudes and experiences in relation to the goals of the conference and to the five key features of the MSP program, and is analyzing the alignment of the conference abstracts with the MSP key features and the conference strands. The project evaluation is also analyzing interviews with individuals involved in the planning and implementation process to assess the quality and value of the project.