Network Resources

Past, Present, and Future NSEC Events »NSEC serves as a hub of activity for centers, faculty, and higher education administrators to share expertise and ideas. Together with these partners, the network has developed a number of resources that can assist STEM Education Centers in their missions and development.

STEM Education Center Toolkit

The Toolkit is a mechanism for spreading the wealth of knowledge and expertise about STEM Education around the community. It explores important issues for STEM Education Centers and provides examples of how members of the community have addressed those concerns.

News and Jobs Announcements

Browse News Items and Job Postings from members of the Network.

Research Action Clusters (RACs)

The purpose of the Research Actions Clusters is to seed work that has the potential to transform undergraduate STEM education by leveraging the unique capacities of centers or a network of centers.

Center Profiles

A wide variety of centers have provided detailed information on their goals, activities, and outcomes as a way of disseminating programmatic and administrative expertise across the community.

 


Capacities and Roles of Centers in Undergraduate STEM Education

Our research examines the development of individual centers, including STEM Education Centers, SECs, and Centers for Teaching and Learning, CTLs, their functional and structural features, focusing on current areas of emphasis and impact, as situated within their institutional contexts. We gathered data across organizational levels seeking to understand the roles of Centers from varied perspectives: through STEM faculty and department chairs engaged with the Center, from the director and staff of the Center, as well as the perceived value of the Center by the upper administration. We also sought to identify the ways in which centers work together on their campuses to sustain, scale, and support undergraduate STEM education.

STEM DBER Resources

Many STEM disciplines have groups of researchers studying education issues in their own context, but now there is a growing movement to share expertise across these boundaries through the creation of networks of discipline-based education research (DBER) practitioners. NSEC asked the DBER community to share resources from within their discipline that may be of interest to others and these pages present listings of useful links and information.

Collaborating at the Centers

The Collaborating at the Center report, written by the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities (APLU) and the POD Network in Higher Education, presents key recommendations on ways STEM Education Centers (SECs) and Centers for Teaching and Learning (CTLs) can work more closely to further national STEM education improvement efforts. The report is based on some of the key findings of 46 leaders from SECs and CTLs who gathered at a November 2015 workshop convened with support from the National Science Foundation.

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Netweaving Resources

Guidance for Network Leaders provides network leaders with questions to think through the purpose, organization, operation, and evaluation of their network.  A second resource, Transformative Learning Networks: Guidelines and Insights for Netweavers, provides insight from four learning networks on how their leadership manages the network, creates learning opportunities, and leverages community participation to enact change within the network. The report's primary audience are the designers and members of learning networks in the improving STEM education space.  In a special issue of the Social Innovations Journal and with support from NSEC and NSF, Bruce Goldstein examines how netweavers can build and maintain the enabling conditions for productivity, commitment, creativity, and purpose in a time of disruption. These papers emerged from a three-year partnership with some of the world's most highly experienced and effective netweavers. The core of these articles are the words of the netweavers themselves, which Goldstein organized and accompanied with commentary to make them coherent and cohesive.

Inventory of Statewide STEM Education Networks

Inventory of State-wide STEM Networks

This inventory of statewide and regional STEM education networks in the United States is a resource for P-12 schools, higher education, business and industries, and other community stakeholders to advance collaboration, engagement, stakeholder support, and further understanding of best practices to sustain these partnerships.

Anti-racism resources (crowd-sourced from NSEC 2020)

During the NSEC 2020 National Conference, we crowd-sourced anti-racism resources that would be useful for centers. If you have items to share, please email Kacy Redd at kredd@aplu.org.

Teaching-remotely resources (crowd-sourced from NSEC 2020)

We know STEM Education Centers play a vital role on campuses in helping disseminate information to STEM faculty. To aid that work, we  have compiled resources related to teaching remotely. If you have items to share, please email Kacy Redd at kredd@aplu.org.

Essays

These essays have been submitted by workshop participants as a means of drawing out community experience on particular issues facing centers in the Network.