Adrianna Kezar co-directing NSF-funded STEM project

The National Science Foundation has awarded a three-year grant to a project co-directed by Adrianna Kezar, Professor of Education at Rossier and Co-Director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. The study, “Scaling Undergraduate STEM Education Reforms at AAU Institutions,” will be co-directed by Emily Miller, Project Manager for the Association of American Universities’ (AAU) Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative. Kezar’s award totals $377,000.

The AAU’s Undergraduate STEM Initiative was launched in 2011 in collaboration with member universities to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). Through research, the initiative hopes to influence the culture of STEM departments at AAU universities by encouraging faculty members to use student-centered, evidence-based, and active-learning pedagogy in their classes, particularly at the first-year and sophomore levels.

The three-year grant from NSF will enable AAU to examine its own role in effecting change on campuses and improving the understanding of how a major national association can promote and scale systemic campus education reforms. Kezar, a nationally recognized expert on scaling up innovations in higher education, will oversee this study.

In March 2014, Kezar began a similar project on a state scale. As a principal investigator for the California State University STEM Collaboratives Project, Kezar is assessing the state college system’s STEM reform efforts through a $400,000 grant funded by the Leona M. and Harry B. Helmsley Charitable Trust. (The Helmsley Trust also funds the AAU Undergraduate Stem Initiative.)

She also received a grant recently from the TIAA-CREF Research Institute for $70,000 to study new faculty models. This project builds on her nationally known work on the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success, which is funded by the Teagle, Spencer and Carnegie Foundations.

Kezar is also winding down another NSF-funded STEM study, “Achieving Scale for STEM Reform: Studying and Enhancing Undergraduate STEM Networks,” a three-year project launched in the fall of 2012. Kezar has been examining and comparing four undergraduate STEM reform networks within three organizations in order to understand how the networks can be most effectively designed to spread innovations among network members and ultimately on the campuses where they are employed.