2013 and 2014 STEP Grantees Meetings

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The American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) is organizing and coordinating the logistics for the 2013 and 2014 Grantees Meetings of the STEM Talent Expansion Program (STEP). These annual meetings bring together Principal Investigator (PI) teams for all STEP projects to exchange ideas, to share progress reports and information about proven practices, and to examine, collectively, issues of STEM retention and degree attainment. The intellectual merit of this project lies in its "meta-level" examination of the general benefits of such community building activities in furthering the aims of the STEP program. For example, the project team is assessing the impact of the content and logistics of the STEP Grantees meeting on program objectives such as: i) increasing awareness of promising practices and promoting their adaptation and use; ii) building and sustaining communities of interest (among faculty, administrators, and community leaders) able to implement, refine, and innovate promising practices; and iii) catalyzing wide-scale action toward undergraduate STEM education innovation by communities of interest that transform into communities of practice beyond individual departments or campuses. Simultaneously, the project is exercising broad impact by identifying strategies that enhance the widespread use of the most effective education practices, which in turn inform efforts to strengthen the robustness of the Nation's STEM workforce and lay the foundation for its global competitiveness.