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Board 41: Developing Summer Research Programs at an NSF ERC: Activities, Assessment, and Adaptation

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Conference

2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Tampa, Florida

Publication Date

June 15, 2019

Start Date

June 15, 2019

End Date

June 19, 2019

Conference Session

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

10

DOI

10.18260/1-2--32344

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/32344

Download Count

473

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Paper Authors

biography

Maeve Drummond Oakes CISTAR at Purdue University

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M. Maeve Drummond, Assistant Director of Education for CISTAR, an NSF Engineering Research Center, has more than 20 years of experience managing academic programs for undergraduate and graduate students. She has worked extensively within the academic community and with external stakeholders. She implements the educational programs for university students, high school students and teachers that are central to the Workforce Development goals for CISTAR.

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Monica E Cardella Purdue University-Main Campus, West Lafayette (College of Engineering) Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0002-4229-6183

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Monica E. Cardella is the Director of the INSPIRE Research Institute for Pre-College Engineering and is an Associate Professor of Engineering Education at Purdue University. She is also the Director for Pre-College Education for the Center for the Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources (CISTAR).

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Maryanne Sydlik Western Michigan University

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Dr. Mary Anne Sydlik is a Research Emerita involved in the external evaluation of a number of federally funded projects.

Dr. Sydlik's interests are in supporting efforts to improve the educational experiences and outcomes of undergraduate and graduate STEM students. She is or has been the lead external evaluator for a number of STEM and NSF-funded projects, including an ERC education project, an NSF TUES III, a WIDER project, an NSF EEC project through WGBH Boston, two NSF RET projects, an S-STEM project, a CPATH project, and a CCLI Phase II project. She also currently serves as the internal evaluator for WMU’s Howard Hughes Medical project, and has contributed to other current and completed evaluations of NSF-funded projects.

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Kristin M. Everett Western Michigan University

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Kristin Everett is a research associate at the Center for Research on Instructional Change in Postsecondary Education (CRICPE) at Western Michigan University and conducts program evaluations and provides consulting services for education, health-care, and nonprofit organizations.

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Abstract

The focus of this poster is the educational programming associated with an NSF Engineering Research Center (ERC). CISTAR, the Center for Innovative and Strategic Transformation of Alkane Resources, is a new NSF ERC in its second year. The center's mission is to create a transformative engineered system to convert light hydrocarbons from shale resources to chemicals and transportation fuels in smaller, modular, local, and highly networked processing plants. The center, a collaborative network of five universities, is supported by four pillars: workforce development, diversity, industry and research. This poster will outline programming and evaluation related to workforce development and diversity including an RET for high school teachers, an REU for undergraduates and a Young Scholars program for high school students. Special emphasis will be made to describe the steps taken to launch the educational programming during the first year of the center.

The overarching broader impact goal of CISTAR Workforce Development is to create a technically excellent and inclusive community of hydrocarbon systems researchers, learners, and teachers through competency-based education, best-practice mentoring, and growth in key professional skills. CISTAR aims to create an environment where people of all backgrounds are welcomed, supported, and respected.

The center engages an external evaluation team with extensive experience in evaluating STEM education programs, technology-based projects, professional development programming, and materials development projects. The evaluators administered pre and post program surveys and interviews to both participants and mentors to address the impact of the project on the participants, ask whether the goals and objectives were accomplished as planned and identify strengths and limitations of the project. These evaluation strategies will be detailed as well as modifications to programming based on the results of this assessment.

Drummond Oakes, M., & Cardella, M. E., & Sydlik, M., & Everett, K. M. (2019, June), Board 41: Developing Summer Research Programs at an NSF ERC: Activities, Assessment, and Adaptation Paper presented at 2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Tampa, Florida. 10.18260/1-2--32344

ASEE holds the copyright on this document. It may be read by the public free of charge. Authors may archive their work on personal websites or in institutional repositories with the following citation: © 2019 American Society for Engineering Education. Other scholars may excerpt or quote from these materials with the same citation. When excerpting or quoting from Conference Proceedings, authors should, in addition to noting the ASEE copyright, list all the original authors and their institutions and name the host city of the conference. - Last updated April 1, 2015