Resources Accessed to Cultivate and Enhance Resilience (RACER)

The project aims to serve the national need to understand the persistence and retention of newly hired secondary STEM teachers in high-needs settings. Towards that end the project aims to study cohorts of Noyce Scholars that have graduated from three different programs. The project team recognizes that teacher turnover is problematic, and that it is often a result of burnout.

Central to understanding burnout is the resilience of the subjects and their access to resources. Therefore, this project intends to see how newly hired teachers access the resources around them to cultivate and enhance resilience. When newly hired teachers are resilient through their acquisition of resources, they can improve their instruction and knowledge, stay in teaching longer and, ultimately, ensure student learning.

The results of this study will reveal how productive a resource orientation is to the persistence of newly hired teachers and the importance of developing resilience in the early years of teaching.

This project at Kent State University includes partnerships with Eastern Washington University and the University of Georgia. Project goals include identifying the resources accessed by newly hired Noyce teachers over time (during two consecutive years in their first five years of teaching), describing the development of resilience, and developing a model to illustrate the relationship among resources, resilience, and burnout.

The Conservation of Resources theory serves as the theoretical framework. This theory and a multidimensional view of resilience provide a more nuanced picture of the personal and contextual factors that influence the persistence of novice teachers. Data will be collected from thirty newly hired Noyce teachers.

Over the course of two years, surveys, interviews, observations, and reflections will be collected and analyzed to answer three sets of research questions. First, what resources do newly hired Noyce teachers access, and how does resource access change over time? Why are the resources useful?

Second, how is resilience developed and portrayed in newly hired Noyce teachers? Finally, what is the relationship between types of resources, resilience, and burnout in newly hired Noyce teachers? The Intellectual Merit of this proposal resides in understanding how newly hired Noyce teachers access resources and their development of resilience.

The Broader Impacts of this proposal reside in better ways to support newly hired science and math teachers in high-needs districts. For high-needs school districts, persistent teachers continue to support learners in experiencing success in mathematics and science, instead of leaving the profession. For teachers, knowing what resources to access can improve their well-being and instruction in mathematics and science.

For students, having resilient teachers can enhance learning for those who have historically experienced teacher turnover and are left behind intellectually in STEM. An Advisory Board comprised of experts external to the project will serve to determine the adequacy of the research and progress of the project towards achieving its intents. Presentations at regional and/or national meetings, as well as publications in journals and on the Internet (e.g., social media, Research Gate, and university websites) will be the primary mechanism for project dissemination of findings.

This Track 4: Noyce Research, or Capacity Building project is supported through the Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program (Noyce). The Noyce program supports talented STEM undergraduate majors and professionals to become effective K-12 STEM teachers and experienced, exemplary K-12 teachers to become STEM master teachers in high-need school districts.

It also supports research on the persistence, retention, and effectiveness of K-12 STEM teachers in high-need school districts.

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.