EAGER: Research to Practice Cooperative Strategic Development Project

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The American Indian Higher Education Consortium, in collaboration with the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities, the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, and other stakeholders, will develop a model for closing the gap between broadening participation research and practice. The project design team will employ a strategic methodology, to develop the framework for a broadening participation network of stakeholder relationships, which should significantly increase the responsiveness of STEM education programs and initiatives focusing on underrepresented populations to relevant research findings, program evaluations, and recommendations derived from them.Intellectual Merit:The project will apply cooperative theories to the problem of the management of the connection between national broadening participation (and possibly more broadly learning sciences) research resources and broadening participation practice. The successes of the project have established that simulations of real-world resource allocation problems access the distributed problem-solving ability of closely interacting groups sharing a common set of intentions, and that involving a diverse set of actors encompassing a broad distribution of knowledge and motivational systems is effective in solving resource allocation problems within a complex resource ecosystem. The strategic planning project will test the hypothesis that the Broadening Participation Research to Practice problem is solvable within this framework.Broader Impacts:The project will establish the applicability of strategic methodology to a major national resource management issue, thereby providing confirmation of a model for addressing a broad range of national issues, including education reform, and other problems within the broader sphere of social dynamics. The proposed work will provide a rich data set that will be used to customize future strategic iterations within complex stakeholder ecosystems involving a wide range of industries, communities, governments, and organizations.