Christine,

The expansive partnership community that your project enjoys and maintains is very impressive. Having this level of commitment from various partners representing the educational community and local community assures greater likelihood of project t impact and buy-in. Nice job!

David

Thanks so much, David! We are so fortunate for our expansive partnerships. We continue to learn from each of our partners, so it's great for professional and personal growth, always. Thanks!

Thanks for visiting, Sara! We offer a broad range of programming. For our undergraduates, they participate in professional development programs such as our NE STEM 4U program (an outreach to K-8 youth in the out of school time space, where they gain targeted workshops on teaching, mentoring, classroom management, youth voice, and how to foster youth leadership), our NoyceSCIENCE program (where our pre-service science teachers/undergraduates in STEM disciplines get targeted mentoring and PD via the leadership team, partnerships through our school district ecosystem, and by gaining specific teaching experiences in "zero hour" high school classrooms). The list goes on, but our website can provide even more information.

Starting this fall, we'll be expanding our undergraduate-focused and faculty-focused workshops and aim to record these (we've now figured out the technology), so we hope that these will be publicly available.

Thanks, Christine!

Thanks, Meena. We are a relatively new Noyce program (we kicked off in May 2017), so our first graduates entered the field this year and exclusively went to an urban setting. However, we hope that future graduates will also consider rural settings. We currently offer, and aim to expand, our rural reach via our NE STEM 4U program, and nearly all of our Noyce participants also mentor and teach via our NE STEM 4U program, so we're trying to provide that wide range of opportunities for our students, but the urban setting has definitely had the greatest attention in our program thus far.

Thanks for your kind note, Nancy. We've been so fortunate to have tremendous partnerships in our great history of STEM at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, largely credited to my colleague Neal Grandgenett, and University leadership that predates my time, too. We're fortunate to have LOTS of partners-- those that are most closely involved include Collective for Youth, Omaha Public Schools, Omaha Citywide STEM Ecosystem (and all of that network), and this list is short- our partner programs total > 80 pages, and can be found within our strategic planning document on our website. We rely on mostly extramural funding (about 90%), and our institution has just made a tremendous investment in resourcing us for the next 5-years to supplement our extramural activity. We really specialize in providing high quality instruction, research, evaluation, and metrics, and welcome partnerships that are interested in the same. Some of these are showcased within our existing publications.

I hear you on the PR-- that's something that we're working to improve. We're working hard to "do", but appreciate these platforms to help share our story more.

Boiler plate for some of our programs with which I'm most familiar: >6,000 youth have come through our programs, >150 undergraduates have taken part in our professional development support systems already (mentorship, workshops, teaching practices), and we're actively developing more resources to bring together other researchers, faculty, students, stakeholders to share our work more widely. Thanks again for your kind note!

Thanks, Jennifer. We've implemented some of the "best practices" from corporate-- including those of the top leaders (such as Patrick Lencioni, with the Table Group). Specifically, we are really focused on a healthy and productive culture surrounding Trust, (healthy) Conflict, Commitment, Accountability, and Results. These principles in putting people first have helped us to be a strong organization. Thanks for highlighting our culture.

Hi Meltem, thanks. We've just prepared a few manuscripts & those are under review at this time. Briefly, we've collated data surrounding student identity, student meta-cognitive development, the influence of course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) and authentic research experiences on participants, how the STEM ecosystem (with in-service science teachers) supports our scholars, and finally which extracurricular activities (second to coursework) are most impactful for 1) retaining and 2) best preparing our participants. We're very focused on marrying student development theory with that of the best practices that we know from the other Noyce projects already. Finally, additional suggestions are always welcomed! Thanks.

Thanks for your keen observation of our programming and network, Ivory. Indeed, we work hard to foster these very relationships ensuring that our students and wider community are supported.

Given the current times, we're quickly pivoting to mobilize our resources and programming into a remote framework. For example, we've moved much of our programming to "Webinar" style using Zoom/GoToMeeting. Similarly, we immediately made all of our youth programming/lesson plans publicly available to assist parents with supporting their kids in active STEM lessons at home, using already available household supplies: https://www.unomaha.edu/academic-affairs/stem-t.... Finally, we're working now to mobilize a "3rd dimension" to our activities to include kits and the like to better assist teachers, parents, students, and learners of all levels. We'll be increasing our web-based (webinar style) programming for lifelong learners as well, beginning next week. Our frameworks remain the same (consistent, high quality programming, active engagement) but are carried out in different ways. My personal favorite is our new "Camaraderie Hours", similar to a "conversation around the water cooler" for folks to exchange ideas and garner new partnerships.

Hi Michael, yes, we're using a few theoretical frameworks, depending on the specific, smaller project. For example, we have the constructivist framework (Piaget) with measures to understand specific experiential learning applications from our participants. Additionally, we are utilizing the Chickering's Vectors (1969, and Chickerings & Reisser 1993) for understanding the progress of our undergraduates through the various vectors of student development. Similarly, we have an ecosystem of pre- and in-service teachers of science. Our Teacher-Researcher Partnership Program, led by Dr. William Tapprich (https://www.unomaha.edu/college-of-arts-and-sci...) includes the impact on student learning (as a result of the expansion teacher professional development activities). There are a few publications on this work so far, and several are under review at this time. Great questions! Thanks for visiting our video!

Thanks, Andrew. I like your highlight of the ways to bring the earliest learners in to be more STEM minded/included. What a clever way! With our work, we have the largest groups of learners at the middle school level, and we know that many students choose if they "like" science or math at the 4th grade level, and so we aim to really continue building that confidence and showing them the excitement that these fields have to offer. You've given me additional ideas to consider for our earliest learners though, when we work more with the 1-3rd graders. Thanks!