The National Science Foundation has awarded Elon University $1.2 million for the training of math and science teachers as part of its Robert Noyce scholarship program. The grant money will fund student scholarships and stipends to subsidize internships at local schools.
Six math, biology, chemistry or physics students will be awarded $21,900 each during their junior and senior years and Elon will award 18 students in total. The awards are the largest academic scholarships the university has ever awarded.
The purpose of the program is to recruit, prepare and support future math and science teachers, according to Jeff Carpenter assistant professor of education and the principal investigator for the Elon program.
"The scholarship and internship opportunities are meant to get students more interested in teaching," he said. "Not everyone knows right away that they want to get into teaching. Having these internship opportunities helps students see what teaching is like."
The grant also supports 50 paid internships, which will be awarded in groups of 10 over a period of five years. The internships will pay about $14 per hour, which is comparable to the money earned by students participating in Summer Undergraduate Research Experiences(SURE).
The internship salaries are funded by the NSF grant and do not come out of the budgets at participating schools. The Elon Academy, Alamance Burlington School System and Alamance Community College have all expressed interest in the internship program, according to Carpenter.
"The internships give students an opportunity to try teaching on for size," said Tony Crider, chair of the physics department and one of the program's sponsors.
The internships and scholarships function separately from each other, so students who participate in the internships do not have to apply to the scholarship and vice versa.
Carpenter said he was motivated to bring the Noyce scholarship program to Elon to increase the number of students in math and science programs.
"We have strong teacher education programs at Elon, and we don't have huge numbers of students coming through the math and science programs," he said. "I was interested in increasing those numbers. There is a lot of demand out there, schools are trying to hire math and science teachers."
Science and math teachers are in high demand in the United States partly because of the increasing need for scientific literacy.
"In an increasingly technical society, an increasing number of jobs require basic science and math skills," Crider said. "Unfortunately, the United States is one of the most scientifically illiterate modern countries in the world."
Crider said that from 2004- 2008, one in every 10 students in his astronomy classes believed the moon landing never occurred. Crider said he views this number as a sign scientific illiteracy in the United States is a huge problem.