National Science Foundation-funded Research Articles

Wastewater surveillance for bacterial targets: current challenges and future goals.

Wastewater-based epidemiology (WBE) expanded rapidly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the public health emergency has ended, researchers and practitioners are looking to shift the focus of existing wastewater surveillance programs to other targets, including bacteria. Bacterial targets may pose some unique challenges for WBE applications. To explore the current state of the field, the National Science Foundation-funded Research Coordination Network (RCN) on Wastewater Based Epidemiology for SARS-CoV-2 and Emerging Public Health Threats held a workshop in April 2023 to discuss the challenges and needs for wastewater bacterial surveillance. The targets and methods used in existing programs were diverse, with twelve different targets and nine different methods listed. Discussions during the workshop highlighted the challenges in adapting existing programs and identified research gaps in four key areas: choosing new targets, relating bacterial wastewater data to human disease incidence and prevalence, developing methods, and normalizing results. To help with these challenges and research gaps, the authors identified steps the larger community can take to improve bacteria wastewater surveillance. This includes developing data reporting standards and method optimization and validation for bacterial programs. Additionally, more work is needed to understand shedding patterns for potential bacterial targets to better relate wastewater data to human infections. Wastewater surveillance for bacteria can help provide insight into the underlying prevalence in communities, but much work is needed to establish these methods.IMPORTANCEWastewater surveillance was a useful tool to elucidate the burden and spread of SARS-CoV-2 during the pandemic. Public health officials and researchers are interested in expanding these surveillance programs to include bacterial targets, but many questions remain. The NSF-funded Research Coordination Network for Wastewater Surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 and Emerging Public Health Threats held a workshop to identify barriers and research gaps to implementing bacterial wastewater surveillance programs.

Color-Evasive/Conscious? A Content Analysis of How Engineering Faculty Discuss Race and Racism in a U.S.-Based Equity-Focused STEM Professional Development Program

Against a backdrop of calls for increased access and participation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs) in the United States have emerged as critical access points for Latina/o/x and other Students of Color. Federal grants can become important levers for building institutional capacity for broadening participation in STEM and transforming HSIs toward better serving Students of Color, specifically as it relates to curricula and pedagogy. In this study, we focus on the engineering faculty at an HSI who are participants in a National Science Foundation-funded, equity-focused professional development program. Operationalizing Bonilla-Silva’s color-evasive racial ideology framework, we use content analysis techniques to explore how engineering faculty discuss race and racism as part of the professional development experience. First, we find that engineering faculty largely rely on color-evasive racial frameworks (i.e., abstract liberalism, minimization of racism) when describing their motivations for participating in the program. Moreover, we find that engineering faculty responses depict a range of surprise and familiarity when reflecting on issues of race and racism. Finally, regardless of prior exposure to module concepts, at the end of the program, the majority of action projects reflect a recognition of race and racism as important.

The Peer-Enabled Restructured Classroom (PERC): Harnessing the Power of Urban Students to Achieve Success in STEM Classrooms

The Peer-Enabled Restructured Classroom (PERC) is an educational model for secondary school science and mathematics classrooms that was developed in New York City public schools under the auspices of a National Science Foundation-funded Math Science Partnership (MSP) between the City University of New York (CUNY) and the New York City Department of Education (NYC DOE). PERC successes demonstrate that middle-performing students in urban, often low-performing schools can be an integral resource to support academic reform and the success of all students. The origins, development, and implementation of PERC in multiple New York City public schools are reviewed in this retrospective. Research studies on the effects of PERC on the students, near-peer leaders, and teachers in the classrooms are presented. PERC demonstrates that restructuring classrooms to engage students deeply in peer instruction can empower students, including those from low-income, often under-resourced school communities, to become student leaders and achievers.

Application of the Policy Regime Framework to understand COVID-19 policy response in the Southeast U.S.: How RAPID research can provide lessons learned after a public health crisis.

Quick-response research during a time of crisis is important because time-sensitive findings can inform urgent decision-making, even with limited research budgets. This research, a National Science Foundation-funded Rapid Response Research (RAPID), explores the United States (U.S.) government's messaging on science in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and how this messaging informed policy. Using rapidly emerging secondary data (e.g., policy documents taken from government websites and others), much of which has since been removed or changed, we examined the interactions between governing bodies, non-governmental organizations, and civilian populations in the Southeastern U.S. during the first 2 years of the pandemic. This research helps to better understand how decision-makers at the federal, state, and local levels responded to the pandemic in three states with the lowest vaccine rates and highest levels of poverty, income inequality, and disproportionate impacts borne by people of color in the nation: Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. This study incorporates the Policy Regime Framework to discuss how two foundational concepts (ideas and institutions) helped govern policy implementation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research fills a significant information gap by providing a better understanding of how policy regimes emerge across multiple levels of government and impact vulnerable populations during times of a public health crisis. We use automated text analysis to make sense of a large quantity of textual data from policy-making agencies. Our case study is the first to use the Policy Regime Framework in conjunction with empirical data, as it emerged, from federal, state, and local governments to analyze the U.S. policy response to COVID-19. We found the U.S. policy response included two distinct messaging periods in the U.S. during the COVID-19 pandemic: pre and post-vaccine. Many messaging data sources (agency websites, public service announcements, etc). have since been changed since we collected them, thus our real-time RAPID research enabled an accurate snapshot of a policy response in a crisis. We also found that there were significant differences in the ways that federal, state, and local governments approached communicating complex ideas to the public in each period. Thus, our RAPID research demonstrates how significant policy regimes are enacted and how messaging from these regimes can impact vulnerable populations.

Teacher Leader Model Standards in Context: Analyzing a Program of Teacher Leadership Development to Contextual Behaviours of Teacher Leaders

<p style="text-align: justify;">A National Science Foundation-funded Mathematics and Science Partnership program, <em>Leadership for Educators: Academy for Driving Economic Revitalization in Science</em><em> </em>(LEADERS), aimed to develop science teacher leaders who would influence the quality of science teaching in their respective schools. To fulfill a need to evaluate leadership abilities of teachers within LEADERS, a Teacher Leadership Instrument was developed based on our previous work. This paper examines the performance of teachers as outlined in the Teacher Leader Model (TLM) Standards following their enrollment in three teacher leadership courses aligned with these Standards. The study employed a qualitative approach to analyze peer professional development sessions provided by teacher leaders, and to rate leadership behaviours and practices. Results indicate that 31 of the 37 functions were exhibited by the teacher leaders, with most observations occurring at a developing level. Behaviours related to effective presentation and facilitation were observed most frequently, but the teacher leaders also incorporated research-based practices, information about assessments, and links to the community in their sessions. Further, these behaviours linked back to the intended outcomes of the three leadership courses. The results demonstrate one manner in which teacher leaders perform the functions of the TLM Standards in the context of professional development sessions.</p>

Making Parasite-Host Associations Visible using Global Biotic Interactions

A wealth of information about how parasites interact with their hosts already exists in collections, scientific publications, specialized databases, and grey literature. The US National Science Foundation-funded Terrestrial Parasite Tracker Thematic Collection Network (TPT) project began in 2019 to help build a comprehensive picture of arthropod ectoparasites including the evolution of these parasite-host biotic associations, distributions, and the ecological interactions of disease vectors. TPT is a network of biodiversity collections whose data can assist scientists, educators, land managers, and policymakers to better understand the complex relationship between hosts and parasites including emergent properties that may explain the causes and frequency of human and wildlife pathogens. TPT member collections make their association information easier to access via Global Biotic Interactions (GloBI, Poelen et al. 2014), which is periodically archived through Zenodo to track progress in the TPT project. TPT leverages GloBI's ability to index biotic associations from specimen occurrence records that come from existing management systems (e.g., Arctos, Symbiota, EMu, Excel, MS Access) to avoid having to completely rework existing, or build new, cyber-infrastructures before collections can share data. TPT-affiliated collection managers use collection-specific translation tables to connect their verbatim (or original) terms used to describe associations (e.g., "ex", "found on", "host") to their interpreted, machine-readable terms in the OBO Relations Ontology (RO). These interpreted terms enable searches across previously siloed association record sets, while the original verbatim values remain accessible to help retain provenance and allow for interpretation improvements. TPT is an ambitious project, with the goal to database label data from over 1.2 million specimens of arthropod parasites of vertebrates coming from 22 collections across North America. In the first year of the project, the TPT collections created over 73,700 new records and 41,984 images. In addition, 17 TPT data providers and three other collaborators shared datasets that are now indexed by GloBI, visible on the TPT GloBI project page. These datasets came from collection specimen occurrence records and literature sources. Two TPT data archives that capture and preserve the changes in the data coming from TPT to GloBI were published through Zenodo (Poelen et al. 2020a, Poelen et al. 2020b). The archives document the changes in how data are shared by collections including the biotic association data format and quantity of data captured. The Poelen et al. 2020b report included all TPT collections and biotic interactions from Arctos collections in VertNet and the Symbiota Collection of Arthropods Network (SCAN). The total number of interactions included in this report was 376,671 records (500,000 interactions is the overall goal for TPT). In addition, close coordination with TPT collection data managers including many one-on-one conversations, a workshop, and a webinar (Sullivan et al. 2020) was conducted to help guide the data capture of biotic associations. GloBI is an effective tool to help integrate biotic association data coming from occurrence records into an openly accessible, global, linked view of existing species interaction records. The results gleaned from the TPT workshop and Zenodo data archives demonstrate that minimizing changes to existing workflows allow for custom interpretation of collection-specific interaction terms. In addition, including collection data managers in the development of the interaction term vocabularies is an important part of the process that may improve data sharing and the overall downstream data quality.

What Methods Do Social Scientists Use to Study Disasters? An Analysis of the Social Science Extreme Events Research Network

Methods matter. They influence what we know and who we come to know about in the context of hazards and disasters. Research methods are of profound importance to the scholarly advancement of the field and, accordingly, a growing number of publications focus on research methods and ethical practices associated with the study of extreme events. Still, notable gaps exist. The National Science Foundation-funded Social Science Extreme Events Research (SSEER) network was formed, in part, to respond to the need for more specific information about the status and expertise of the social science hazards and disaster research workforce. Drawing on data from 1,013 SSEER members located across five United Nations (UN) regions, this article reports on the demographic characteristics of SSEER researchers; provides a novel inventory of methods used by social science hazards and disaster researchers; and explores how methodological approaches vary by specific researcher attributes including discipline, professional status, researcher type based on level of involvement in the field, hazard/disaster type studied, and disaster phase studied. The results have implications for training, mentoring, and workforce development initiatives geared toward ensuring that a diverse next generation of social science researchers is prepared to study the root causes and social consequences of disasters.

(Keynote) Engineering Research Centers –Past, Present and Future

During the recent decades, the scientific and engineering community and the federal agencies have explored the potential of large-scale center-type research programs. It has been recognized that many of the most challenging and complex technical problems can only be addressed if researchers with diverse expertise combine their efforts and work across the boundaries between disciplines. The National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Center (ERC) program is a flagship program in this regard.The ERCs are interdisciplinary, multi-institutional centers that join academia, industry, and government in partnership to produce transformational engineered systems and educate individuals that are adept at innovation and primed for leadership in the global economy. They operate at the interface between the discovery-driven culture of science and the innovation-driven culture of engineering. Since the ERC program’s inception in 1984, NSF has funded over 70 ERCs across the United States. The NSF funding level has been at about $4 million per year for each ERC for up to 10 years, during which time the centers would develop partnerships with industry, universities, and other government entities to sustain them upon graduation from NSF support. Throughout the years, the ERCs have contributed significantly to the technical community and the nation; educated more than 12,000 engineering graduates with interdisciplinary training, produced a tremendous amount of high impact publications, patents and licenses, and spin-off companies. Studies have estimated that the total downstream market value of ERC innovations to the U.S. economy is well over tens of billions of dollars. Recently, NSF funded the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to conduct a study to create a vision for future research centers in engineering (A New Vision for Center-Based Engineering Research, 2017, The National Academies Press). Building upon the NASEM’s recommendations, NSF developed a roadmap for the next generation of ERCs (Gen-4), which emphasizes cutting-edge research efforts that are convergent and will lead to strong societal impact. A Gen-4 ERC will have interacting foundational components that cover convergent research, workforce development, culture of diversity and inclusion, and innovation ecosystem. This presentation will provide an overview of the NSF ERC program to date, as well as new opportunities for the Gen-4 ERCs.

Applications for marine mammal studies using passive acoustic data from the Coastal Endurance array off Newport, Oregon

The National Science Foundation-funded Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI) maintains a series of coastal and oceanic monitoring sites that consists of a multitude of physical and biological sensors. As part of this program, OOI has collected continuous, broadband passive acoustic data along the continental shelf and slope off Newport, Oregon since 2016. The Coastal Endurance cabled array consists of two mooring lines that straddle the Columbia River plume, and capture data from this nutrient rich upwelling site along the northeast Pacific coast. In addition to this instrumentation, underwater gliders conduct regular transects to provide better spatial resolution of coastal ocean parameters in the region. Representative data from the continental slope and seamount recording sites of the Coastal Endurance Array were reviewed for vocally active marine mammals. Physical oceanographic variables collected concurrently from the mooring line instrumentation and coastal gliders were used to spatially and temporally characterize the regional marine mammal habitat. This effort demonstrates applications for use of OOI’s accessible, multi-instrument platform for conducting marine mammal ecosystem studies.

Examining the Recruitment, Placement, and Career Trajectories of Secondary Mathematics Teachers Prepared for High-Need Schools

BackgroundSchool leaders are challenged by the relatively limited supply and high turnover of qualified secondary school mathematics teachers. In response, policy makers and teacher educators have developed various pathways and incentives to recruit, train, place, and support highly qualified mathematics teachers to work in hard-to-staff schools.Focus of StudyIn this study, we investigate the recruitment, placement, and early career trajectories of 158 Grades 6–12 mathematics teachers from two preparation programs focused on staffing “high-need” schools in the same region.SettingThe contrasting programs were both supported by the same university in the Northeast United States.Participants & ProgramsThe participants were 158 secondary school (Grades 6–12) mathematics teachers. Of these, 48 were recruited and prepared through a teacher education program with financial support from the National Science Foundation-funded Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program. The other 110 school mathematics teachers were recruited and trained through the Greater Boston office of Teach For America. Both programs required two years of service in high-need schools.Research DesignIn this study, we used a comparative design. Descriptive profiles of teachers from each program were created. Then, participants’ early career trajectories were compared using logistic regression and survival analysis.Data Collection and AnalysisWe administered a longitudinal survey and created a database combining survey data and each program's administrative data.ConclusionsOur data illustrate that the Noyce scholarship-supported pathway was generally successful in recruiting individuals with STEM majors, training them to be mathematics teachers, and placing those individuals as secondary school mathematics teachers in high-need schools. The comparison of the scholarship-pathway teachers with the secondary school mathematics teachers in the alternative-certification pathway provides a useful contrast. On the one hand, the alternatively certified secondary school mathematics teachers were less likely than the scholarship-pathway teachers to have STEM majors, and the attrition rate for the alternatively prepared teachers was higher than the attrition rate for the scholarship-supported teachers, particularly after they had completed the two-year service requirement. On the other hand, the alternative-certification program recruited a more diverse pool of potential teachers and placed these teachers in schools serving a higher proportion of low-SES students.

Preparing the Next Generation of Data-Driven Scientists through the Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education – Data Initiative (BLUE Data)

The Biodiversity Literacy in Undergraduate Education - Data Initiative (BLUE Data) is a US National Science Foundation-funded Research Coordination Network in Undergraduate Biology (RCN-UBE) working to generate community consensus around biodiversity data literacy skills. This diverse network brings together biodiversity, data, and education specialists to identify core biodiversity data competencies for undergraduate students, develop strategies for integrating these competencies into the introductory biology curriculum, and build capacity for sustained development and implementation of biodiversity and data literacy education. Since the start of funding one year ago, BLUE Data has been working to review the current landscape of data literacy competencies from primary to graduate education in biodiversity data science, identify gaps in student learning related to data and biodiversity science core skills, and generate community consensus on defined biodiversity data literacy standards. At a recent BLUE Data workshop associated with the Emerging Innovations for Biodiversity Data conference in Berkeley, California, participants worked together to define competencies and identify strategies to facilitate broad-scale integration of transferrable data literacy skills and knowledge to improve undergraduate biology training and meet increasing workforce demands in both data and biodiversity sciences. This discussion also identified current efforts and explored existing resources in order to identify gaps that should be targeted in our efforts moving forward. In this presentation, we will introduce the SPNHC and TDWG communities to BLUE Data, and describe our vision and goals, partners, and educational modules. We will share results from our recent activities, including the outcomes of the Emerging Innovations for Biodiversity Data workshop. BLUE Data welcomes new partnerships with those also interested in defining the undergraduate biodiversity data literacy landscape and charting future efforts of this network.

Breaking Boundaries: Pressing Issues in Equity, Computing, and Problem-Solving in STEM Undergraduate Education

The April 2017 National Science Foundation-funded Breaking the Boundaries in STEM Education conference brought together Southern California science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) faculty to explore equity, problem-solving, and computing in an interdisciplinary manner. Two main research questions guided the overall scope of the conference: (1) What are the common threads across disciplines to approach the teaching and learning of skills that are relevant in STEM? (2) What are the challenges and barriers that need to be overcome in order to foster collaboration across disciplines to impact the teaching and learning of skills relevant in STEM? We describe the background of the conference and provide an overview of the questions addressed.

A Competency‐Based Approach to Developing Biomolecular Visual Literacy

When you show a visual representation of a biomolecule, do your students “see” what you “see”? Are they able to interpret the model correctly and draw appropriate conclusions about the structure and atomic/molecular interactions? Do they grasp that cartoon and space‐filling models represent the same protein? Biochemistry instructors use visual representations of biomolecules to teach many concepts, yet there are few tools and frameworks to assess whether students can interpret these models. The BioMolViz.org group is a team of educators developing these tools. Over four years, we have identified a set of overarching themes that encompass biomolecular visualization skills with teachable objectives. We define proficiency levels for the objectives, describe student competency within the objective at the novice (first year) and amateur (junior/senior year) levels, and link these competencies with assessment questions. For example, the objective: “students will describe the significance of the monomer unit location within the three‐dimensional structure of a polymer” can be applied throughout the student's academic career. Novice students would be expected to identify the termini of a biological polymer, while more advanced students would catalog interactions of monomers that stabilize the macromolecule. Here, we present our current efforts on this Biomolecular Visualization Framework, including the results from four National Science Foundation‐funded 2018 workshops and our diversity SACNAS/ABRCMS outreach efforts. We propose targeted visual literacy development will enable students to understand the structure and associated function of biomolecules. The BioMolViz.org website makes resources widely available to help instructors facilitate this growth.Support or Funding InformationThis work was supported by the National Science Foundation under award numbers DUE‐1022793, ‐1323414, ‐1503811 and IUSE‐1712268. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Regenerative medicine: a vehicle to infuse laboratory-bench modules into an exercise physiology curriculum.

Regenerative medicine is a novel discipline that both excites undergraduates and may be used as a vehicle to expose students to scientific concepts and opportunities. The goal of this article is to describe the implementation of a National Science Foundation-funded Targeted Infusion Project in which underrepresented minority undergraduates are exposed to laboratory-bench skills and summer research opportunities that they may not have encountered otherwise. A 3-wk infusion of laboratory-bench and data presentation skills, in the context of a regenerative medicine/bioengineering project, aimed to engage students and expose them to opportunities as summer researchers and teaching assistants. The infusion aimed to assess the extent to which students improved 1) attitudes toward laboratory-bench-based techniques, using attitudes toward science as a proxy; 2) perceptions of scientific inquiry; 3) intentions to engage in undergraduate research; and 4) intentions to persist in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)-related fields. Results indicate that the 3-wk infusion had no effect on science attitudes, but transcribed responses to structured interviews administered after the summer research experience indicated that students who completed summer research projects had positive experiences. Differences in intentions to engage in research were detected between groups of students in different STEM majors, in addition to differences in intentions to pursue a career in science. We describe the implementation of the infusion and briefly discuss quantitative outcomes. We conclude that infusion of laboratory-bench modules in the context of a regenerative medicine/bioengineering project may play a small but important role in increasing (minority) participation and persistence in the STEM pipeline.

Managing the innovators: Organizational and professional commitment among scientists and engineers

How can leaders best manage commitment among innovators? We applied theory on dual allegiance to multiple targets of commitment, in conjunction with person-organization fit theory, to explore the dynamics of organizational and professional commitment among scientists and engineers working in hybrid, research-focused organizations. These types of organizations are founded on large-scale multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional collaboration between academe and industry. Using both individual- and organizational-level variables collected from 255 academic science and engineering researchers working in 22 National Science Foundation-funded Engineering Research Centers, our analyses revealed that researcher innovation orientation (i.e., the predisposition to approach work in novel ways) was positively associated with organizational and professional commitment. Those relationships were moderated by two factors: organizational productivity in late-stage technology transfer and the researcher‘s perceived role significance (i.e., in fulfilling the strategic mission of the organization). The strongest positive relationship between innovation orientation and organizational commitment emerged among researchers who perceived high role significance and worked in highly productive organizations. A negative relationship between innovation orientation and professional commitment also emerged among those individuals. Post-hoc analyses revealed that highly innovative, senior researchers who perceived high role significance were the most likely to report higher levels of both organizational and professional commitment. Leaders of multi-disciplinary research centers who are aware of the complexity of dynamics among organizational commitment, professional commitment, and role significance may be better equipped to effectively manage science and engineering researchers.

Impacting the Community through a Sophomore Design Experience

Cornerstone design at James Madison University is a two-semester, client-based service learning project. Each year, sophomore engineering students work to design human-powered vehicles for a community member with needs very different from their own as a result of cerebral palsy. This paper provides a reflection of the fifth iteration (2013-2014) of this year-long sophomore design experience with the overarching goal to provide a transferable model such that other engineering programs may learn from our lessons and develop their own service learning experience. The reflection contained in this paper was catalyzed through participation in the National Science Foundation-funded Integrating Design and Community Engagement within the Curriculum Workshop hosted at Purdue University from June 19-20, 2014. In addition to reflection on the course, the paper provides insight into course coordination and assessment, and lessons learned over the past five years.

Data mining with iPlant: a meeting report from the 2013 GARNet workshop, Data mining with iPlant.

High-throughput sequencing technologies have rapidly moved from large international sequencing centres to individual laboratory benchtops. These changes have driven the 'data deluge' of modern biology. Submissions of nucleotide sequences to GenBank, for example, have doubled in size every year since 1982, and individual data sets now frequently reach terabytes in size. While 'big data' present exciting opportunities for scientific discovery, data analysis skills are not part of the typical wet bench biologist's experience. Knowing what to do with data, how to visualize and analyse them, make predictions, and test hypotheses are important barriers to success. Many researchers also lack adequate capacity to store and share these data, creating further bottlenecks to effective collaboration between groups and institutes. The US National Science Foundation-funded iPlant Collaborative was established in 2008 to form part of the data collection and analysis pipeline and help alleviate the bottlenecks associated with the big data challenge in plant science. Leveraging the power of high-performance computing facilities, iPlant provides free-to-use cyberinfrastructure to enable terabytes of data storage, improve analysis, and facilitate collaborations. To help train UK plant science researchers to use the iPlant platform and understand how it can be exploited to further research, GARNet organized a four-day Data mining with iPlant workshop at Warwick University in September 2013. This report provides an overview of the workshop, and highlights the power of the iPlant environment for lowering barriers to using complex bioinformatics resources, furthering discoveries in plant science research and providing a platform for education and outreach programmes.

SciEthics Interactive: science and ethics learning in a virtual environment

Learning in immersive 3D environments allows students to collaborate, build, and interact with difficult course concepts. This case study examines the design and development of the TransGen Island within the SciEthics Interactive project, a National Science Foundation-funded, 3D virtual world emphasizing learning science content in the context of ethical dilemmas. The 2 year development process is examined through the lens of the rapid prototyping instructional design model, following the project from conceptualization to implementation of a 3D simulation. Through expert interviews, focus groups, and working groups, we were able to determine critical scientific and ethical issues to present to learners in the virtual world. We collected data on 53 students using the simulation at universities in the United States and South Africa and evaluated their experience using qualitative and quantitative methods. Results showed that student participants were engaged and motivated by the simulation. The students reported an increase in science knowledge and ethical understanding, but individual experiences varied.

Developing Effective Mathematics Teachers through National Science Foundation Funded Math and Science Partnership Grants

Every year the National Science Foundation (NSF] gathers together leadership teams of funded Math and Science Partnership programs (MSP) at a Learning Network Conference in Washington, D.C. The purpose of the annual conference is to bring together teams of MSP leaders who represent institution higher education (IHE] faculty from STEM disciplines, IHE education faculty, school partners, and project evaluators, to give them an opportunity to learn across projects, and provide opportunities for individual projects to reflect on their progress. For the last two years, 2011 and 2012, we were part of the conference's organizing committee. During the two-day conference, project teams were invited to articulate their theories of action for preparing teachers to be effective STEM teachers and to describe in broad strokes or in fine grain detail what was happening within their projects' professional development opportunities. Projects also had the opportunity to share within a public forum the preliminary, incomplete, or final results emerging from projects' evaluations or research efforts aiming to determine whether the MSP projects were deepening teachers' content and pedagogical knowledge, changing teachers' practices, and, ultimately, positively impacting students' success.While the Learning Network Conferences are intended to be for leaders within the MSP community, what MSPs are learning about STEM teaching and learning and professional development are worth sharing to a wider community.. Thus, as follow up to 2012 Learning Network Conference, we proposed to help MSP teams publish articles focused on mathematics teaching and learning accessible to a community broader than other MSP projects. Dr. Bharath Sriraman, editor of The Mathematics Enthusiast, generously offered us the opportunity to publish this special issue.We approach the task of guest editors as empathetic solicitors and reviewers of scholarship associated with MSP projects. We are leaders, ourselves, for multiple MSP projects, and have been since 2004, first for a middle school mathematics project (Math in the Middle Institute Partnership, http://scimath.unl.edu/MIM/) and now for a K-12 mathematics project [NebraskaMATH, http://scimath.unl.edu/nebraskamath/index.php): Smith is also a leader on a Research, Evaluation, and Technical Assistance (RETA) project [Data Connections, http://scimath.unl.edu/dataconnections/index.php). We understand the time-consuming nature and inherent challenges of trying to create meaningful professional development with teams of interdisciplinary IHE faculty, and partner with school districts, to offer professional development and study its impact on teachers and their students in the dynamic life of real districts, schools, and classrooms. We have experienced the learning of teachers and their students to be neither linear nor quick, therefore, we understand that studying STEM teaching and learning is messy, long term, and anything but straightforward. We understand that, for the most part, it is the same MSP leaders who are offering professional development as who are trying to study its effectiveness and that frequently the days are not long enough to do both simultaneously. Thus, we find MSP projects with their own rhythm and life, waxing and waning their research efforts in concert with their professional development offerings, with one or the other receiving more attention at any given point in time. All MSP project leaders must balance a set of teaching and research priorities in ways that never quite feel satisfactory. These are priorities and tensions that we, indeed, understand from the inside.We sent out a call for articles to the 2012 Learning Network Conference participants following the conference, and a motivated, hard working group of authors, who double as leaders for mathematics focused MSP projects, responded, some of whom are publishing their scholarship for the first time in this special issue. They have taken their 2012 conference presentation proposals and presentations focused on the theme of effective STEM teaching and created manuscripts. …

A MULTI-INSTITUTIONAL STUDY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN HIGH SCHOOL MATHEMATICS ACHIEVEMENT AND PERFORMANCE IN INTRODUCTORY COLLEGE STATISTICS

In this study we examined the effects of prior mathematics achievement and completion of a commercially developed, National Science Foundation-funded, or University of Chicago School Mathematics Project high school mathematics curriculum on achievement in students’ first college statistics course. Specifically, we examined the relationship between students’ high school mathematics achievement and high school mathematics curriculum on the difficulty level of students’ first college statistics course, and on the grade earned in that course. In general, students with greater prior mathematics achievement took more difficult statistics courses and earned higher grades in those courses. The high school mathematics curriculum a student completed was unrelated to statistics grades and course-taking. First published May 2012 at Statistics Education Research Journal: Archives