Collaborative Research: Building Capacity to Improve STEM Education through Citizen Science by Scaling Up University-Community Partnerships

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This project aims to serve the national interest by enhancing STEM education outcomes for all students, including women and underrepresented minorities. Research suggests that increased persistence in STEM fields could be achieved by better connecting STEM content to broader issues in students’ communities. A feasible way to make these connections is through citizen science. Citizen science projects create opportunities for anyone to participate in collecting and analyzing data to support a scientific project. Such projects have the potential to link scientific content and process to real world problems that are relevant to students’ communities. Furthermore, these projects require students to engage in active learning, which is also known to improve student learning outcomes in STEM fields. This project is a collaboration between North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University and North Carolina State University. It is designed to lay the foundation for establishing University-community partnerships to establish citizen science communities that connect undergraduate STEM learning to underserved communities.Capacity building efforts focus on three domains: 1) needs assessment for scaling up the project; 2) knowledge and relationship building; and 3) information technology infrastructure. Capacity building efforts will target barriers and identify bridges needed at social, organizational, and individual levels. This change effort will focus on further developing inclusive learning environments. Specifically the project aims to enable undergraduates to more highly value their educational experiences through increased awareness of the relationship between STEM course content (i.e., knowledge, skills, and perspectives) and the issues impacting underserved communities. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.