1999 Precollege Science Education
Initiative for Biomedical Research Institutions

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute has sponsored a project to partner teachers and students with researchers at UCLA.

View attached article.

Proposal Summary

Our goal is to enrich the science experiences of the teachers and students of California through a comprehensive program of technology, hands-on, and research-based experiences.

The UCLA IMMEX project has been funded to create a combined faculty, teacher, high school student research partnership program. Two components are well-established programs having individually impacted hundreds of teachers and thousands of students and, when combined through this program’s activities will provide new insights into the effective interactions among these different instructional modalities. The third component is an experimental extension of these established programs that will create 24 faculty/teacher/student research partnerships. These partnerships will enrich the experiences of students aspiring for a research career, and expand the science content/process knowledge of the teachers. We envision a very unique and effective science partnership that will impact teachers and students directly in our local area and indirectly across the country via the IMMEX technology. The proposal has strong internal and external assessment components, and through commitments from the UCLA School of Medicine, the Los Angeles Unified School District, and individual school principals, contains an extensive cost-sharing component.

There are two levels of student involvement associated with this proposal. For students with an interest in pursuing a biomedical research career, our project will involve 6 students each year in a 5-week faculty/teacher/student research experience at UCLA. When they return to their schools, they will continue to work with their teacher and faculty partners to implement hands-on and research activities explored during this research experience. For these students we will provide a $1,000 savings bond as a stipend.

Other teachers (24) will participate in 5-week research partnerships with the faculty of the UCLA biomedical community. Faculty and graduate student partners established during these research experiences will continue the collaborations by participating in school visits. Other teachers (dozens) will participate in the development/pilot testing of hands-on curricular materials.

The process of integrating these two approaches into the classroom will be one where the students engage in hands-on exercises in the laboratory and then the thoroughness of their understanding of content/concepts will be probed and enhanced using a complementary set of IMMEX problems. Such integration will provide the student with a varied and comprehensive set of science experiences and will help us better understand the interactions between these two different learning modalities.