Current Projects

This $2.8M National Science Foundation-sponsored Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program is designed to transform the education practices in the core courses in mathematics, science, and engineering taken by all engineering students in their first two years at Stevens Institute of Technology.  Foundations project provides three years of support to enable the faculty who teach the critical early core courses to understand and adopt evidence-based teaching practices, iteratively redesign their course and assess the impact of those changes, and target deep and transferable learning within and across disciplinary domains.  Strategies to support faculty change include ongoing discussions of principles of teaching and learning and discipline-based education research; trained peer assistants to facilitate active learning pedagogies in lectures and recitations; midterm course evaluations as formative feedback; and advocacy with colleagues internally and externally to catalyze diffusion beyond these early courses. 

With support from the National Science Foundation, Arts and Technology faculty at Stevens are collaborating with science and engineering educators at CIESE to develop and pilot a STEM-rich multimedia production course for high school students.  A central goal of the project is to increase the interest and participation of girls and groups historically underrepresented in STEM learning and careers. The course introduces students to the fundamentals of multimedia and video production through hands-on experiences, collaboration and creative thinking with particular emphasis on the engineering design process, relevant science content knowledge, and documentation of design decisions and supporting rationale in a design log. During the 9-week course, students work in teams to reach creative decisions about a storyline, audio components, animation/visual components and production strategies necessary to produce a 5-minute animated video. The project advantages the near universal appeal and interest of students in music, video and technology to promote an understanding of engineering design and relevant physics concepts in the context of multimedia production, and appreciation of the fundamental role of STEM in popular culture. 

NJ RAISE is a NJ Department of Education-sponsored Mathematics and Science Partnership program to prepare K-8 teacher leaders from Bayonne, Elizabeth, Union City and Weehawken school districts to serve as Science Ambassadors, helping to improve science teaching and learning within their communities. The two-year program is designed to ensure that the Ambassadors receive intensive professional development and mentoring on the Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) and the Educators Evaluating the Quality of Instructional Products (EQuIP) rubric such that they can facilitate their use and understanding by other teachers in their schools and districts.  Ambassadors help facilitate professional learning community (PLC) meetings in their schools and serve as resource in their communities to provide NGSS training and assistance to other teachers. 

PISA², an $11.5M National Science Foundation-sponsored Mathematics and Science Partnership program, engages grades 3-8 teachers from 14 New Jersey school districts to enhance their content and pedagogical content knowledge and practice in science and engineering. Participants enroll in either a series of five graduate-level science courses or in a series of one-week summer institutes, each organized around a different core science idea. Professional development activities are led by Stevens disciplinary faculty and CIESE science and engineering teaching experts. In addition, all teachers participate in school year, full-day workshops and are provided one-on-one, in-class support. Professional development foci include: model making, explanation and evidence and engineering integration. Project research is investigating the extent and nature of change in teacher knowledge and practice, as well as impact on students’ science, engineering knowledge, critical thinking and creativity.

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A partnership involving five universities and funded by the National Science Foundation, the goals of this project are to study how high school science teachers in different disciplines learn engineering concepts, how they introduce those concepts in the classroom, and to develop a set of recommendations to guide teachers in infusing curricula with engineering concepts and activities. This 5-year, $3 million National Science Foundation, Discovery Research K-12 project involves a two-year professional development and implementation commitment with two cohorts of teachers learning engineering concepts and infusing curriculum materials in biology and physics with the targeted concepts and design activities. Project partners include Black Hills State University, Purdue University, University of Massachusetts at Boston, and University of Maryland, Baltimore County.