Preparation for Persistence: Building a Community of Practice to Research and Support Noyce Scholars in High-Need Schools

This project aims to fill the national need for preparing highly effective STEM teachers who are likely to persist in high-need schools and districts. Recent reports indicate that the demand for STEM teachers exceeds the supply. This gap, together with high rates of teacher turnover, are particularly evident in schools and districts with high poverty rates.

This project intends to engage ten university-based STEM teacher preparation programs from across the United States in a community of practice. The project will engage this community in research-based strategies to understand the components of teacher preparation programs that contribute to teachers’ preparation and persistence in these high-need contexts.

The research study responds directly to calls for comparative studies that examine the specific components and characteristics of STEM teacher preparation programs.

This project, led by researchers at the Education Development Center and University of Massachusetts Boston, includes partnerships with nine additional university-based Noyce teacher preparation programs. The project goals include establishing a collaborative community of practice among Noyce teacher preparation programs. A second project goal includes working with the community of practice to collect and reflect upon data from approximately 560 Noyce program alumni and 150 current Noyce scholars.

The project will address four research questions related to teachers’ persistence in high need schools and districts, and the relationships between their preparation experiences and their STEM teaching and cultural efficacy. A third project goal is to develop data collection tools and use survival analysis methodology to uncover relationships between preparation program characteristics and teacher persistence.

Broad dissemination of research findings, including through the university partners and regional and national conferences and networks, completes the set of project goals. The project will use grounded qualitative analysis to examine emergent patterns that will illuminate whether and how components of teacher preparation relate to each other and to the teaching outcomes being measured.

Analyzed components will include those that support the development of disciplinary content knowledge, professional knowledge and pedagogy, and program context, design, and quality assurance. This Track 4: Noyce Research 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.