Catalyst Award: Enhancing STEM education and recruitment through hands-on learning

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Catalyst Projects provide support for Historically Black Colleges and Universities to work towards establishing research capacity of faculty to strengthen science, technology, engineering and mathematics undergraduate education and research. It is expected that the award will further the faculty member's research capability, improve research and teaching at the institution. and involve undergraduate students in research experiences. This project at North Carolina Central University is designed to increase the enrollment in the undergraduate Environmental Geographic Science Program. Hands-on learning is expected to increase the retention rate and enrollment in the program. The goal of this project is to enhance STEM education and recruitment at NCCU by implementing hands-on learning, thereby contributing to increase the enrollment in the B.S. Environmental Geographic Science program (EEGS) at NCCU. In this project, the following activities will be conducted: 1) Develop and implement hands-on labs for two existing courses including GEOG2100 Physical Geography and ENSC2100 Global Environmental Sustainability; 2) Develop two new environmental science courses: ENSC2600 Environmental Science and ENSC 2700 Environmental Education and Outreach with significant number of hands-on labs; 3) Extend hand-on labs to students from high schools for the recruitment of STEM majors. Handheld instruments and devices will be acquired to establish a quality teaching facility and allow faculty to implement hands-on learning and to extend hands-on learning to students from high schools. It is expected that there will be a significant improvement in student performance and mastery of concepts in two existing STEM courses. There also will be an increase in the retention rate and enrollment of EEGS program at NCCU. The methods developed in this project could be extended to many other STEM courses to enhance STEM education at Minority institutions.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.