Abstract
Staffing high schools with highly qualified math and science teachers continues to be a challenge for school districts across the U.S. (NCTAF, 2010; Ingersoll & Merril, 2010). One way to address this challenge is to offer financial incentives, in the form of scholarships or grants, for high performing college students to become high school mathematics or science teachers. Oftentimes, attached to these financial incentives are service commitments to which recipients must agree to teach for a specified number of years in a high-need school or district. Investigating the impact these types of scholarship programs have on the high school math and science teacher staffing issue is an area that warrants more research. To help identify some characteristics of students involved in these types of financial incentive programs, our study investigates how the Robert Noyce Scholarship Program influenced students’ decisions to become a high school mathematics or science teachers and their dispositions about teaching in schools. In this study, we administered a 70 item survey to 61 participants (29 experimental group, 32 control group) during the summer of 2015. Latent variables were created using Exploratory Factor Analysis and differences between the experimental and control groups were tested with the Mann-Whitney U and Chi-Square tests. Findings indicate statistically significant differences in three areas: (a) scholarship recipients’ decisions to become a high school mathematics or science teacher, (b) plans for graduate education, and (c) teacher preparation.
Highlights
Staffing high schools with highly qualified math and science teachers continues to be a challenge for school districts across the U.S (NCTAF, 2010; Ingersoll & Merril, 2010)
Some questions within categories were analyzed on a statement-by-statement basis and others had latent variables created via an Exploratory Factor Analysis
Some research exists on factors that influence Noyce Scholars’ decision to enter the teaching profession and how the financial incentive of the scholarship impacted their decision to teach (Bull et al, 1994; Darling-Hammond, 2007; Liou, Desjardins, & Lawrenz, 2010; Liou & Lawrenz, 2011; Henry et al, 2012) but little research can be found on characteristics special to Noyce Scholars
Summary
Staffing high schools with highly qualified math and science teachers continues to be a challenge for school districts across the U.S (NCTAF, 2010; Ingersoll & Merril, 2010). The continual lack of effective teachers in these teacher shortage areas has negatively impacted the quality of instruction and has created a cycle of ineffective teaching in classrooms that has numerous adverse implications (Darling-Hammond, 2007) This problem is even more acute in schools that serve low-income students or schools that serve predominantly Black or Hispanic students where there are high percentages of non-certified teachers (Carroll, 2007; United States Department of Education, 2015). The Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (TSP), funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is one example of a government initiative that was enacted to address the critical need of teachers in high-need schools or districts, in the content areas of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Internal factors, such as the ones mentioned above, contribute to the scholarship recipients’ decisions to enter teaching, but there are external reasons such as teaching scholarships
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