2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

One of the requirements for a teacher participant in a National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Experience for Teachers (RET) site is to convert the knowledge from the research experience into K-12 course curriculum. This motivates the teacher participants to actively think about how to convert the university research knowledge into something understandable by K-12 students. Each teacher needs to play a more active role in participating and drilling down into the research to effectively create new materials, rather than as a watcher or bystander of research activities. The course development usually needs to follow some curriculum standards such as Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) in many states and Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) in Texas. NGSS is too general to provide useful guidance for detailed course module development. TEKS is very detailed in each course’s requirement, but teachers need to find their own ways to meet these requirements. NSF RET solicitation recommends the use of TeachEngineering.org (TE) template as the standard for course module development and distribution. Therefore, TeachEngineering template has been used by the teachers in our RET sites in the past few years. However, the acceptance rate of our teacher’s submission to TeachEngineering.org is consistently low (about two out of 12 teachers in each cohort can complete), even though a $1,800 incentive course fee is offered for each successful submission. Teachers cited various reasons for not completing the submission: too busy / no time, too much trouble, cannot find a good topic, very long review cycle, miscommunication (never got emails), no clue on how to revise when the first submission was declined, etc. A teacher needs to be highly self-regulated and persistent to complete this submission process. As such, a set of interventions was taken to improve the submission success rate starting from 2022. The actions include: 1) coordinate with TeachEngineering.org about shortening the review cycle time; 2) improve communications (make sure emails are not blocked by local school districts or go into a spam folder); 3) invite the TeachEngineering director to give an introductory talk to teachers at the beginning of the RET summer program; 4) recruit an experienced master teacher to provide more detailed guidance; and 5) follow up by the professors to ensure the course module quality. As a result, the submission success rate has been improved. Six out of the 12 teachers in summer 2022 have published their TeachEngineering course modules with a few more in the pipeline. Two teachers in the summer 2023 cohort have already published their course modules. One course module excerpt is provided as an example in this paper.