NIH Bridges to the Baccalaureate

The Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program provides support to institutions to help students make transitions at a critical stage in their development as scientists. The program is aimed at helping students make the transition from 2-year junior or community colleges to full 4-year baccalaureate programs. The program targets students from groups underrepresented in the biomedical and behavioral research enterprise of the nation and/or populations disproportionately affected by health disparities (targeted groups).

The Bridges to the Baccalaureate Program promotes institutional partnerships between community colleges or other 2-year post-secondary educational institutions granting the associate degree and colleges or universities that offer the baccalaureate degree. The partnership/consortium must involve at least two colleges or universities but no more than four institutions, including the applicant institution, unless strongly justified. The bachelor’s degree-granting institution(s) in the consortium must have a strong science curricula and a track record of enrolling, retaining, and graduating students who pursue advanced degrees in biomedical and behavioral research fields. Community colleges and other 2-year post-secondary educational institutions in the consortium must offer associate degree programs with an emphasis on the biomedical and behavioral sciences and must have a high enrollment, as determined by the applicant institution, of students from targeted groups.

NSF/AYS Science in the City

Intellectual Merit: The ultimate goal of the Science in the City Academies (SICA) project is twofold: a) to improve the students’ knowledge of and interest in STEM careers and through this b) to improve science and mathematics achievement of middle grade students attending four very challenged inner city Philadelphia schools that are managed by Temple University. SICA should enable students to do this through participating in engaging inquiry-based curricula, increasing their appreciation of scientific advances and challenges, and helping them take advantage of scientific opportunities presented to them in-school, out-of-school, and in their communities. Also, the project will increase the science knowledge of these students’ teachers, and help the teachers learn new pedagogical strategies to incorporate into their classrooms. The project is composed of three components: program implementation, research, and evaluation. We propose to:

• Institute an academy of urban scientific inquiry based teaching and learning through a comprehensive and coordinated set of programs, for Grades 5 through 8 students, in-school and after-school teachers, and parents. This project uses informal science education agencies and business partners to reinforce, complement, and augment the in-school School District of Philadelphia's mandated science and mathematics curriculum with an innovative series of scientific inquiry-based curricula.

• Test the effectiveness of such a set of programs using multiple data sources and sophisticated statistical techniques. While students attending these schools have experienced some improvement in achievement, these schools remain among the most challenged in the whole district. The change in student career interest and student achievement has been selected as the two ultimate dependent variables in the project for a number of reasons:
  1) they are a measurable effect of increased attainment and interest in science and mathematics, and
  2) they allow for comparisons among students, among schools, and over time. Also, this research will shed light on the effect of two kinds of professional development, general and curriculum-specific, on teachers' classroom practices.

• Use a mixed methods evaluation program will be performed to assess the quality and effectiveness of the programs. Formative evaluations will be on-going and summative evaluations will be performed annually.

NSF/TPC TU-SMART

The model being tested is that K-12 in-service teacher practices are a function of the K-12 school characteristics, the classroom characteristics, the in-service teacher characteristics, and the pre-service education conditions. We plan to subject a specific pedagogy, formative assessment, which has been receiving increasing attention, to an explicit random experiment research design. Our project is based on the theory that the more opportunities pre-service teachers have for hands-on experience connecting formative assessment and content, the more likely they are to use formative assessment in their classrooms. Our assessment classes will use examples from the connected content classes to help the teachers to develop formative assessment techniques of their own. Two cohorts of students will be followed through their pre-service courses and into their student teaching and in-service teaching assignments in Philadelphia classrooms. In each cohort, there will be 48 students in the experimental and control groups and 96 in the statistical comparison group.

Pennsylvania Department of Health - Tobacco Grant

The National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute’s (NHLBI) Atherosclerosis Risk In Communities (ARIC)study concluded that hypertension was a particularly powerful risk factor for CHD in black persons, especially black women, and that diabetes was a weaker risk factor for black persons than white persons. Framingham risk scores are used to provide risk assessment for cardiovascular disease (CVD). However, there are significant limitations to the Framingham risk assessment. Risk factors do not include family history/genetic predisposition or the presence of the metabolic syndrome. Framingham markers can underestimate risk for certain subgroups. Women need to be 20 years older than men to achieve the same risk score. It also under-predicts risk associated with hypertension in African-Americans. Atherosclerosis is much more significant in diabetic and obese patients. However the mechanism at a molecular level is not well understood and therefore risks and treatment options need careful investigation.