Building Community through Grantee Meetings for the STEM Talent Enhancement Program

NSF STEM人才提升计划(STEP)旨在增加全国大学、学院和社区学院STEM专业的毕业生人数。实现这一目标的主要手段是向个别机构或机构小组提供择优补助金，以支持实施改善招收和留住STEM学生的战略(根据最佳做法)。STEP的整体成功取决于“最佳实践”的开发和实施，而“最佳实践”又依赖于PI(从业者)社区的发展，这些社区共享想法、资源和数据，以及谁可以相互借鉴成功和经验。该项目的目标是计划和组织2010年、2011年和2012年的年度会议，以促进参与资助的STEP项目的科学家、管理人员、学生支助专家和评估员之间的社区建设。该项目借鉴了前四次受赠人会议(2006年至2009年)的经验教训，以提高会议对所有与会者的价值。与以往的会议一样，每次会议将在华盛顿特区地区举行，为期1.5天，包括三个主要部分：全体会议；分组会议，重点讨论对与会者至关重要的议题；以及招贴式会议，所有项目都有代表参加。可能的全体会议发言者包括在高等教育领域工作的研究人员，特别是在招生、留住和发展、体制变革或促进多样性等主题上工作的研究人员，以及其工作强调提高国家在STEM学科方面能力的重要性的专家。分组讨论将集中讨论对参与者及其项目至关重要的主题。通常，来自成熟STEP项目的PI将担任首席讨论者或小组成员，由NSF项目官员主持讨论。海报会议将为所有与会者提供机会，分享他们与会议主题有关的挑战和成功。所有的会议计划都将在与适当的计划官员和由几个STEP PI组成的咨询委员会的协商下进行，并将受益于参与者对与先前会议的有效性有关的调查的反应的分析。这项建议的智力价值在于增加了利用不同战略分享从STEP项目中吸取的经验教训的机会。由此产生的调查人员群体将能够取得比他们仍然孤立的情况下更多的进展。对于STEP等项目中的研究人员来说尤其如此，因为在科学学会会议或同行评议文章中分享想法和发现的框架是缺乏的。该项目的更广泛影响在于，这些研究人员分享他们的成功和失败，导致STEM学生留住和招收方面的整体改善，以及随着社区发展出一系列可以被其他机构采用或改编的经过验证的最佳实践，从长远来看，可以开发更好的项目。

The NSF STEM Talent Enhancement Program (STEP) aims to increase the number of students graduating in STEM disciplines from the nation's universities, colleges and community colleges. The primary vehicle for achieving this goal is through the provision of merit-based grants to individual institutions or teams of institutions to support the implementation of strategies to improve recruitment and retention of STEM students (based on best practices). The overall success of STEP depends on the development and implementation of "best practices," which in turn depends on the development of a community of PI's (practitioners) who share ideas, resources, and data, and who can build on each other's successes and experiences. The goal of this project is to plan and organize annual meetings in 2010, 2011 and 2012 to facilitate the building of community among the scientists, administrators, student support specialists and evaluators involved in funded STEP projects. The project builds on the lessons learned from the first four STEP Grantees' meetings (2006 to 2009) to enhance the value of the meeting for all participants. As with previous meetings, each meeting will be held in the Washington, DC area over a period of 1.5 days, with three major components: plenary sessions; breakout sessions focused on topics of central importance to the participants; and poster sessions in which all projects are represented. Potential plenary speakers include researchers working in the area of higher education, particularly on topics such as student recruitment, retention, and development, institutional change, or the promotion of diversity, as well as experts whose work has emphasized the importance of increasing the nation's capacity in STEM disciplines. Breakout sessions will focus on topics of central importance to the participants and their projects. Typically, PI's from mature STEP projects will act as lead discussants or panelists, with NSF program officers moderating the discussions. Poster sessions will provide all participants the opportunity to share their challenges and successes as they relate to the theme of the meeting. All meeting planning will be done in consultation with DUE program officers and with an advisory committee of several STEP PI's, and will benefit from the analysis of responses of participants in surveys relating to the effectiveness of prior meetings.The intellectual merit of this proposal lies in enhancing the opportunity to share the lessons learned from STEP projects using diverse strategies. The resulting community of investigators will be able to make significantly more progress than they would if they remained isolated. This is particularly true for investigators in programs such as STEP because the framework for sharing ideas and findings in the meetings of scientific societies or in peer-reviewed articles is lacking.The broader impact of the project lies in the overall improvement in retention and recruitment of STEM students resulting from these investigators sharing their successes and failures, and in the development of better projects in the long run as the community develops a collection of proven best practices that can be adopted or adapted by other institutions.