Science grant to aid K-12, grad students

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MSU researchers, graduate students and K-12 teachers will team up throughout the next few years under a multimillion dollar grant aimed at promoting science education in the lives of youngsters.

The National Science Foundation, or NSF, recently awarded a five-year, $2.65 million grant under a Graduate Teaching Fellows in K-12 Education program.

The money primarily will be used to fund graduate student fellowships that are expected to enhance the students’ current studies, as they also work with K-12 students and teachers in about a dozen Michigan school districts.

The NSF grant will fund eight graduate fellowships, and the MSU Graduate School supplied additional funding for a ninth scholarship under the program. The fellowships will focus on research in biofuel sustainability, and much of the work will be carried out at MSU’s Kellogg Biological Station, or KBS, in Hickory Corners, Mich.

“This focuses on graduate students becoming better at communicating and serving as ambassadors to the general public,” said Thomas Getty, the project’s leader and a zoology professor at MSU. “Part of the goal … on this is to try to make science a more attractive career path to K-12 students.”

Getty said the grant is the most recent in a series of grants for a program at KBS called the K-12 Partnership in Science Literacy, which has been in existence for about 10 years.
The graduate students, all of whom have been selected and officially will be appointed as fellows May 15, will create projects to help teach students at 11 school districts near KBS, Getty said.

Alycia Reynolds Lackey, a graduate student studying animal behavior and evolution and one of the fellows, said the prospect of working with K-12 teachers and students on science projects excites her.

Lackey also said the experience will be beneficial later in her life, as she plans to become a professor at a university and will want to work with K-12 teachers and students in that setting.

She said the fellows primarily will work with students in middle and high school.

“From (the teachers’) perspectives, it’s great to have someone who’s comfortable with the ideas of science … to then work with them to come up with activities that their students want to do,” Lackey said.

Lackey said a workshop will be held April 21, when MSU researchers and the fellows first will meet with the K-12 teachers.

Andy Anderson, a professor of teacher education at MSU who said he has worked with the KBS program since 2001, said it will help better prepare K-12 students for environmental issues they will encounter in their adult lives.

“I’ve greatly enjoyed working with the teachers out there,” Anderson said. “They do lots of interesting work with their kids, and we’ve had a chance to work with them on research projects where we’re developing ideas about how kids learn and, hopefully, better ways of teaching them.”

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