Pullias Center Awarded Nearly $1M of National Science Foundation Grant

The Pullias Center for Higher Education was awarded an approximately $3M combined National Science Foundation IUSE Grant in collaboration with the Association of American Colleges and Universities over 5 years, with nearly $1m of that targeted for the Pullias Center.

The grant will fund the “Scaling Support for Non-tenure Track STEM Faculty through Learning Communities and Design Teams” project.  The goal of this project is to address the increasing number of non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) who lack the institutional support to provide a quality learning environment for students in STEM, particularly in remedial math and introductory science, technology and engineering courses.

The principal investigator for this project will be Dr. Adrianna Kezar, director of the University of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education, and Dr. Kelly Mack, the vice president for undergraduate STEM education at the Association of American Colleges and Universities.

“Many efforts are underway to create novel curriculum and teaching approaches in STEM courses,” notes Dr. Kezar.  “However, none of these important innovations will succeed without addressing support for the non-tenure track faculty who teach the majority of these courses.”

The project proposes to develop a national, research-based institute, held annually for four consecutive years, for small teams of faculty and administrators from college and university campuses to learn about, and put in place, appropriate supports for NTTF. The institute will help campuses create professional learning communities for NTTF.  Additionally, the institute will set up a design team focused on addressing the working conditions for NTTF on campus that will lead to substantive policy and practice changes so these educators can participate in the learning communities.

This study will build upon earlier results from prior research co-authored by Dr. Kezar as part of the CSU STEM Collaboratives project, which explored ways to improve STEM education to support student success.  In general, STEM has a very high dropout rate, particularly for first generation, underserved minorities, and low-income students, who experience graduation rates ranging from 20-30% compared to 46% for white students.  NTTF play a crucial role in STEM education, as this segment teaches most of the introductory courses, particularly math courses, where students have the highest initial rate of failing out.

“Faculty teaching is so critical to diverse student success,” highlights Kezar.  “This new project, generously funded by National Science Foundation, has the potential to break new ground in uncovering ways to get them the support they need guide their students to success.”

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Grant No. 1914784. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.