Business-Higher Education Forum Receives Funding from Northrop Grumman Corporation to Advance Innovative STEM Education Model

Funding will support modeling effort’s focus on STEM teachers

Washington, DC (April 1, 2010) — The Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) has received a $100,000 grant from Northrop Grumman Corporation to help expand its U.S. STEM Education Model—a unique simulation modeling tool for science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education.

BHEF is a national organization of Fortune 500 CEOs, prominent college and university presidents, and foundation leaders who work to advance innovative solutions to U.S. education challenges that affect competitiveness and the economy. One of the organization’s main goals is to double the number of STEM graduates by 2015.
 
The model, developed by the Raytheon Company and donated to BHEF in 2009, enables policy makers to simulate the impact of factors, such as changes in teacher quality and student participation in undergraduate cohort programs, on increasing the number of STEM graduates.  As such, it offers a powerful new tool for education policy makers that can help them understand the effect of various policies over time and simulate outcomes before implementing those policies.

Northrop Grumman’s grant will support BHEF’s further development of the model as it relates to STEM teachers by synthesizing existing research regarding:  the impact of teacher training, qualifications, and certification on developing “STEM-capable teachers;” the multiple pathways to becoming a STEM-capable teacher; and the issue of teacher retention and attrition; and then building these into the model. Additionally, the grant will support the modeling effort’s open source community, the STEM Research and Modeling Network (SRMN), which brings together researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and others who seek to use simulation modeling and similar tools to identify ways that student interest, participation and achievement in the STEM fields can be strengthened.

“We need to further explore the influence of multiple pathways to becoming a STEM-capable teacher as well as the factors that affect teacher recruitment and retention,” says BHEF Chair David J. Skorton, president of Cornell University. “With this generous grant we will be able to better understand the impact of teacher training, qualifications, and certification on developing STEM-capable teachers.”

Current forecasts of student degree attainment in the United States suggest that the U.S. will not produce enough STEM graduates at the two- or four-year college level to meet employer demand. The development of the model and the accompanying SRMN represent the mobilization of a community committed to aggressively addressing this challenge through innovative tools.