SUNY Chancellor Johnson Announces Buffalo State to Receive Over $500,000 from National Science Foundation to Help Teachers Provide STEM Learning Experiences to More Students
July 18, 2019
Federal Funding Secured to Support Development of High-Quality Instructional Resources to Improve Student Learning Outcomes
Albany – State University of New York Chancellor Kristina M. Johnson today announced that Buffalo State College is the recipient of a highly competitive, four-year $1.7 million National Science Foundation (NSF) Discovery Research PreK-12 (DRK-12) grant. The SUNY campus was one of three colleges awarded this year, receiving $565,623 to support the campus’s high-quality instructional resources to help teachers provide STEM learning experiences to more New York State students and improve learning outcomes.
Each year, the NSF awards a small number of DRK-12 grants to projects that are designed to have significant impact on STEM education. The Buffalo State project "Building a Teacher Knowledge Base for the Implementation of High-quality Instructional Resources through the Collaborative Investigation of Video Cases" is led by Department of Mathematics Associate Professor David Wilson.
"This important and innovative work led by Professor Wilson will ensure that more students have access to engaging, hands-on learning experiences in the classroom," said SUNY Chancellor Johnson. "SUNY is proud to have a role in shaping our nation’s future experts in STEM, and my congratulations to Professor Wilson on receiving the NSF DRK-12 grant award."
The project will allow Western New York middle and high school teachers to meet on a monthly basis at Buffalo State to share insights and experiences around video case studies. The New York State Master Teacher Program, a web of more than 800 public school educators, has leveraged the existing STEM education capacity at Buffalo State to help it become a hub for STEM Professional Development. The NSF-funded project will further extend and enhance the opportunities for K-12 STEM teachers to participate in high-quality professional development.
"Buffalo State College has a proud history of both preparing future teachers for classrooms across New York State, and providing a space for current teachers to collaborate, review best practices, and deploy innovative teaching and learning experiences across the region and state," said Buffalo State President Katherine Conway-Turner. "The lesson plans K-12 math teachers deliver in classrooms each day are setting the foundation for the STEM and business leaders of tomorrow. I would like to congratulate Professor Wilson on receiving the NSF grant and thank him for his collaborative work."
Dr. Wilson, a regional director of the New York State Master Teacher Program based at Buffalo State, has collaborated with Math for America to develop a K-12/higher education research-practice partnership that includes teachers in the study of best classroom practices.
"A number of New York State Master Teachers have been involved in developing and utilizing the case studies in professional development activities," said Buffalo State Professor Wilson. "The NSF funding will support additional teachers from across the region to engage in professional development that is designed to elicit thinking about the teaching and learning of particular content strands across the grade levels."
Along with Buffalo State, the DRK-12 grant was awarded to researchers at Montclair State and DePaul University. The schools will collaborate with Math for America, the New York State Master Teacher Program, and the DePaul University STEM Center on a Math of America teachers-based project.
Established in 2004, Math for America (MfA) is committed to improving teacher retention by building and supporting communities of outstanding STEM educators. Its innovative video library, which features Math for America teachers using high-quality math lesson plans in their classrooms, is central to the team’s project.
The NSF funding will support teacher-leaders in different cities across the country as they implement high-quality lesson plans, create new videos for the MfA library, and collaboratively investigate them in order to understand how to teach the lessons more effectively.
The video library can be accessed by creating a free account at the Teaching and Learning Exploratory, a video repository created by the University of Michigan to house collections of teaching videos. The lesson plans implemented in the videos are available for free at the Math Assessment Resources Service.
About the State University of New York
The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive system of higher education in the United States, and more than 95 percent of all New Yorkers live within 30 miles of any one of SUNY’s 64 colleges and universities. Across the system, SUNY has four academic health centers, five hospitals, four medical schools, two dental schools, a law school, the country’s oldest school of maritime, the state’s only college of optometry, and manages one US Department of Energy National Laboratory. In total, SUNY serves about 1.4 million students amongst its entire portfolio of credit- and non-credit-bearing courses and programs, continuing education, and community outreach programs. SUNY oversees nearly a quarter of academic research in New York. Research expenditures system-wide are nearly $1.1 billion in fiscal year 2023, including significant contributions from students and faculty. There are more than three million SUNY alumni worldwide, and one in three New Yorkers with a college degree is a SUNY alum. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunities, visit suny.edu.
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Holly Liapis
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