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Grant will fund institute to improve rural high school science skills
Madeleine
Jaehne, College of Medicine
217-244-8264
9/8/06
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has been named the recipient
of a $5 million grant to establish and support a program to improve
achievement in chemical sciences and computational literacy among students
in rural Illinois high schools.
The National Science Foundation grant will be used to establish the
Institute for Chemistry Literacy and Computational Sciences in secondary
schools in Illinois. The institute will train 120 high school chemistry
teachers to become teacher-leaders who can, in turn, teach and lead
based on the latest research and using computational methods of visualization
and communication.
“The preparation of teachers, especially in disciplines that affect national
competitiveness, is extremely important,” said Richard Herman, the chancellor
of the Urbana campus. “We are delighted to play a leading role in this
important work.”
At the U. of I., the units involved in developing the institute will
be the College of Medicine, the department of chemistry and the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications. The A-C Central Community Unit
School District 262 in Chandlerville, Ill., and the Regional Office
of Education in Lincoln, Ill., also will participate in developing
the institute.
“We want to prepare students so that they have the skills to go into
medicine and biomedical careers,” said Diana Dummitt of the College of
Medicine.
“Chemistry today is a key to the life sciences, and students’ chemistry
skills are directly reflected in medical school admissions,” said Dummitt,
who is one of five co-principal investigators on the grant.
The
institute has set four goals for the next five years: strengthen
rural high school teachers’ and students’ understanding
of chemistry within the context of 21st-century scientific research;
increase teachers’ use of, and comfort with, computational and
visualization tools in their teaching; establish a group of high school
and university-level faculty teacher-leaders who will be advocates
for excellence in science education; and promote institutional change
in university and school district partners.
The institute program will offer two-week residential sessions for
three consecutive summers; extensive academic-year online support;
two academic-year regional meetings; and academic-year online interaction
among partners and participants. The first group of teachers will start
their training in the summer of 2007.
The institute will create an online community of participants and project
staff by means of Access Grid communications technology and Moodle,
a course-development tool. These will foster comfortable, mutually
beneficial interchanges about chemistry content and pedagogy; chemistry
understanding informed by the latest scientific research; and leadership
development for teachers at various levels of their careers. The project
will employ a randomized control trial research/evaluation design intended
to contribute to research on improving teacher quality.
The supporting partners of the grant include four rural Illinois regional
offices of education, in northwest, west central, south central, and
far southern Illinois; the Illinois Institute for Rural Affairs; the
Illinois Petroleum Resources Board; the Illinois Science Teachers Association;
the National Center for Rural Health Professions; the Three Rivers
Educational Partnership; the National Board Resource Center at Illinois
State University; and Argonne National Laboratory.
