Board 326: K-12 Teachers and Data Science: Learning Interdiscplinary Science Through Research Experiences

Data science is now pervasive across STEM, and early exposure and education in its basics will be important for the future workforce, academic programs, and scholarly research in engineering, technology, and the formal and natural sciences, and in fact, across the full spectrum of disciplines. When combined with an emphasis on soft skills and an interdisciplinary focus, such educational experiences have deeper and more meaningful effects. Our Montclair State University NSF Research Experience for Teachers (RET) grant (NSF Award Number: #2206885, IRB Number: 22-23-3003) exposed teachers to a program integrating solar weather, data science, computer science and artificial intelligence, and STEM pedagogy. The cohort comprised nine middle- and high-school teachers with diverse academic backgrounds and demographics from northern and central New Jersey. The teachers interacted with and were advised by faculty from Montclair and two other institutions, and by outside experts, to learn the basics, develop lesson plans, and present these to and interact with a learning-intensive summer camp. As a capstone, teachers developed research projects synthesizing this interdisciplinary content with their own interests and background. As a result, the teachers have submitted several posters with abstracts to the 2024 ACM SIGCSE and IEEE ISEC conferences and will be delivering grant-related lessons in their classes during the current academic year.