REU Site: STEM CATS: Creating Academic Teacher Scholars in STEM Education

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The goal of this University of Kentucky REU project is to prepare STEM teachers by fostering the development of their higher order thinking skills and deep conceptual STEM understanding based on research-confirmed best practices that they, themselves will investigate. The project will expose 24 pre-service K-12 STEM teachers to timely problems involving STEM teaching and learning through original research conducted with eight successful faculty mentors affiliated with University of Kentucky's STEM Education Department. The project will also provide experiences that may increase the interest of students from Bluegrass Community and Technical College in becoming K-12 STEM teachers.During the project pre-service STEM teachers will participate in authentic inquiry into local educational issues with national and international implications such as spatial recognition, informal learning, and mathematics experiences and conceptions. The project will help the students to cultivate an appreciation of the interplay between society and education and research, especially concerning the multiple transformative means of fostering STEM literacy across diverse learner populations. Students will be exposed to hands-on application of the social-scientific methods that they could eventually practice in their own STEM classrooms. Students will also be introduced to broader issues impacting these methods such as how ethics affect testing of certain hypotheses and how social biases might influence research with respect to which methodologies are used and how results are reported. Formative information will be collected each semester from all involved to monitor progress toward goals and guide program improvements. Summative information will be comprised of longitudinal outcomes data analysis to determine overall impact. While quantitative data will be used to discover correlations between students' sense of efficacy and likelihood of continuing to research (the Research Self-efficacy Scale and the NSF Biology's Undergraduate Research Student Self-Assessment), semi-structured interviews will be conducted to discover how participants, who vary by a variety of factors, respond individually to the project.