BIORETS: Genes & the Environment: Research Experiences for Teachers from Rural & Tribal Schools

This BIORETS Site award to the University of North Dakota, located in Grand Forks, ND, will support eight teachers for eight weeks during the summer. Three cohorts of teachers will be recruited from 2024-2026. Teachers will participate in an intensive six-week research experience followed by two weeks of curriculum development.

Support will continue throughout the academic year. This program aims to significantly increase the exposure of rural and tribal students to molecular biology and scientific research. To ensure advancement of DEI goals, recruitment will focus on secondary teachers from rural and tribal schools in the Northern Great Plains region, a large area with a low population, where small schools are the norm.

To address disparities, this program will provide the teachers actual research experiences in environmental biology as it pertains to gene regulation. Teachers will present their curriculum and outcomes to other educators, thus extending the impact of the program.

Teachers will be involved in ongoing research projects in the Biology and Pathology departments. Teachers will be invited to apply to the program through the NSF ETAP (Education and Training Application) system. Before starting the program, teachers will be provided information about the research and introduced to their mentors via Zoom meetings.

Throughout the summer, the teachers will learn laboratory safety and ethics/responsible conduct of research, and attend workshops on education theory and project-specific laboratory techniques, experimental design, data collection, analysis, and presentation. Teachers will also be trained in using molecular biology-based kits in their classroom activities.

Curriculum development will focus on integrating their summer research project. Post-program, the PIs, mentors and teachers will meet via Zoom to assist with lessons and discuss challenges. The program will provide the teachers with the kits and research supplies and equipment.

Program assessment will include both evaluation of the summer and academic year program itself, as well as the impact of the new curriculum on student learning and attitudes about STEM. This award is jointly supported by the Division of Biological Infrastructure (DBI) in the Directorate for Biological Sciences (BIO) and the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) in the Office of Integrative Activities (OIA).

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.