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Zern STEM Foundations Fellowship

Posted on December 02, 2024 by Scott Pauls

The Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL) is sponsoring a new fellowship for STEM faculty interested in easing the transition of our incoming students into STEM.  The fellowship provides additional salary and a $2,000 support fund for materials and other expenses over the course of the fellowship term.  All instructors – tenure line, term faculty, instructional faculty, etc. – are eligible to apply.  DCAL, in partnership with many other units on campus, will form support teams for the fellows tailored to their projects.  The Fellowship is named in honor of Alan and Judy Zern who were among the founding donors for DCAL.

Applications for the initial round of fellowships close on 2/15/25.

 

Application

Use our application form to apply.  You'll be asked to dicuss:

  1. The problem or challenge you are addressing
  2. An outline of the project, its goals, and timeline
  3. A description of how the project interacts with your department or program's curriculum, how the results will be used, and the level of buy-in from your colleagues 
  4. The impact you hope to have and how you will measure success
  5. An estimate of the time you will spend on the project
  6. Expertise and support that would enable the project

You can also create an application template that you can complete and upload on the application page.

Expectations

  1. Attend weekly meetings with the support team for the length of the project.
  2. In the first meeting, create a project blueprint, timeline, outcomes, and measures of success, built on the application materials.
  3. Deploy of a student survey on the intervention
  4. Present in the Teaching Science Seminar and meetings of interested departments upon project completion and launch
  5. Share artifacts for use as templates or adoption by other instructors, departments, and/or programs.
  6. Overall, time spent on the project should match the amount of salary requested.

Project Examples

While we are open to any and all ideas, to give a sense of possible projects we offer examples in three categories. Projects may have different durations due to their goals and objectives.

Data collection and analysis

Often we can recognize a problem - for example, student persistence in intended major - but not the factors that are causing it.  A project in this direction might collect and analyze institutional data, student survey and focus group data to understand causes and their possible mitigation.  

Dartmouth has had several of these efforts over the years, most recently by the Thayer School who identified barriers to persistence in their major.

Resource Creation

Instructors may wish to create new resources for students to gain skills and experience that will help them succeed in STEM courses.  Wendy Epps and Mike Ragusa, in Chemistry, provide a great example of this type of project.  Seeing the need for many students in CHEM 5 to review some topics covered in high school mathematics classes, two years ago they launched a Canvas site containing several review modules for mathematical techniques linked to chemistry applications.  

Course/Curricular Design

Another approach to improve student outcomes is to (re)design an introductory course or courses.  Many examples of this appear across campus.  For example,

  • The Writing 2-3 sequence, particularly the sections aimed at international students who might not have conducted all or part of their schooling in English, provides students with an alternative route to completing the writing requirement.
  • ENGS 1, an equivalent course to MATH 1 in terms of satisfying prerequisites, introduces calculus content in the context of Engineering problems to increase retention for students who are interested in ENGS.
  • The Integrated Mathematics and Physics Sequence, while no longer offered, provided students with an intertwined path through the introductory calculus and physics sequences.
  • One of DCAL and LDI's past efforts, the Gateway Initiative led to the redesign of many large introductory courses including ANTH 3, BIOL 13, CHEM 52, CLST 1, COLT 1, COSC 1, EARS 6, ECON 20, ENGS 31, MATH 3, PHYS 13, PSYC 1, RUSS 13, and SOCY 1.

Support Possibilities

We envision a large network of potential supports for fellows tailored to their projects.  Fellows will be primarily supported by a team anchored by members of DCAL and the Learning Design and Innovation Team.  The team will be augmented by other staff based on project needs that may include:

  • Project Management
  • Technical support
  • Media resources
  • Accessibility resources
  • Wellness resources
  • Academic skills resources
  • Library research and teaching support
  • Data support from institutional research
  • Support in IRB requests for evaluation
  • Connections to units and groups like FYSEP, OPAL, Dartmouth Emerging Engineers,  the EE Just Program, and the Dartmouth NEXT Initiative.