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1. Improving Belonging and Connectedness in the Cybersecurity Workforce: From College to the Profession

   Klinger, Mary Beth (February 2024, Journal of Cybersecurity Education, Research and Practice)

   Whitman, Michael E; Mattord, Herbert J.; Hollingsworth, Carole (Ed.)

   This article explores the results of a project aimed at supporting community college students in their academic pursuit of an Associate of Applied Science (AAS) degree in Cybersecurity through mentorship, collaboration, skill preparation, and other activities and touch points to increase students’ sense of belonging and connectedness in the cybersecurity profession. The goal of the project was focused on developing diverse, educated, and skilled cybersecurity personnel for employment within local industry and government to help curtail the current regional cybersecurity workforce gap that is emblematic of the lack of qualified cybersecurity personnel that presently exists nationwide. Emphasis throughout the project was placed on community building so that students felt a part of the cybersecurity community. A project community survey was distributed to students as both a pre-test when they began the project in Year 1 at the start of their cybersecurity coursework, and again as a post-test at the conclusion of Year 2 when they finished their cybersecurity program. Two project cohorts were employed, and the survey questionnaire measured students’ sense of connectedness and level of learning within the project environment. The results showed a marked increase in both constructs from the pre- to post-survey indicating that students felt a greater sense of community as they moved through the project and experienced increased learning through their cybersecurity program. The study concluded that increased feelings of connectedness to the project activities through authentic shared learning experiences promoted belonging and provided social and academic supports to help project students be successful in their cybersecurity academic program and going forward in the in-demand cybersecurity vocation throughout their professional careers. 

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2. Curriculum to Broaden Participation in Cybersecurity for Middle School Teachers and Students

   Buchanan, L.; Scarlatos, L.; Telendii, N. (March 2021, 11th IEEE Integrated STEM Education Conference)

   To both broaden and increase participation in any STEM field such as cybersecurity, we need to attract more students. Research shows that to do this, students need to be engaged with cybersecurity during middle school. There is a lack of age-appropriate and classroom-ready cybersecurity curriculum, however, and many teachers feel unprepared to teach the subject. To address this gap, the CyberMiSTS project team created a summer professional development workshop for middle school teachers that integrated a recent research-based understanding of cybersecurity into a curriculum that is accessible to both middle school students and their teachers. The project sought to encourage participation of a broad and diverse set of students in the field of cybersecurity by showing them how human relations play an important role in cybersecurity. We discuss our prior related work using branching web comics to introduce middle school students to cybersecurity concepts and careers, and the state of evidence-based research into effective approaches and methods for cybersecurity education. We identify challenges to broadening the pipeline for a truly diverse cybersecurity workforce that can meet industry’s need for cybersecurity professionals with a wide range of experience and skills. The paper introduces our approach for the teacher professional development workshop, maps how we designed the project to meet our research goals, and documents initial findings regarding what is needed to increase teacher self-efficacy about cybersecurity concepts and careers in a middle school classroom. 

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3. Board 421: Using Interdisciplinary Engineering Design Challenges Coupled with Career Exploration to Develop an Engineering Identity in Low-Income Students

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--47011  

   Castles, Ricky; Venters, Chris (June 2024, ASEE Conferences)

   East Carolina University (ECU) was funded by a multi-institutional Track 3 S-STEM Grant #1930497 in January 2020. The funds from this grant have been used to recruit and support three cohorts of students at ECU and three partnering community colleges. The project is referred to internally as the PIRATES project for Providing Inclusive Residential and Transfer Engineering Support. In addition to funding scholarships, the research aim of this project uses Lee and Matusovich’s Model of Co-Curricular Support for Undergraduate Engineering Students [1] to study best practices in co-curricular support for both students who start their pathway towards an engineering degree at a university and students whose higher education academic pathway began at a community college. Major goals of the project include building a sense of belonging and an engineering identity among students both within and across cohorts and institutions. One of the ways that this project has worked to encourage student retention and persistence in engineering is through engineering design challenges coupled with related presentations from speakers working in a variety of engineering careers. The goals of these events are to showcase the many opportunities engineering students have and the many ways that engineers work to solve local and global issues by having students engage in small engineering projects that can be completed in one day and showcasing how those projects relate to a broader field of engineering. The projects extend the experiences students have in various engineering courses and labs and introduce some technical skills that students may not develop in traditional classrooms and lab courses. This paper will highlight the design problems posed to students during single-day design activities in which students from all cohorts and participating institutions were invited to work in teams to tackle design challenges. Student teams were purposefully assigned to get students working together who attend different institutions and are in different graduating classes to create mentoring opportunities for less experienced students to learn from more experienced students. Emphasis is also placed on how students were introduced to career opportunities related to the design challenges by recruiting alumni from the partnering institutions to speak on the work they do and how their educational pathways prepared them for diverse careers. This paper will also discuss survey and focus group interview data from students participating in these activities to showcase how the activities may have helped to expand their knowledge of opportunities available to engineers in a variety of fields. 

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4. Long-Term Outcomes of RET Programs on Female and Minority Student High School Graduation Rates and Undergraduate STEM Major Rates (Fundamental)

   Nichol, C.; Crawford, C. A.; Barr, C.; Cerda, I. (January 2021, ASEE Annual Conference proceedings)

   null (Ed.)

   Research Experience for Teachers (RET) programs are National Science Foundation (NSF) funded programs designed to provide K- 12 Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) teachers with immersive, hands-on research experiences at Universities around the country. The NSF RET in nanotechnology encourages teachers to translate cutting-edge research into culturally relevant Project-Based Learning (PjBL) and engineering curriculum. Traditionally, the evaluation of RET programs focuses on the growth and development of teacher self-efficacy, engineering content knowledge gains, or classroom implementation of developed curriculum materials. However, reported methods for evaluating the impact of RETs on their female, minority student populations' high school graduation and undergraduate STEM major rates are limited. This study's objective was to compare RET high school student graduation rates and undergraduate STEM major rates across gender, race, and ethnicity to a comparison sample to determine the RET program's long-term impact on students' likelihood of pursuing STEM careers. The approach of collecting and analyzing the Texas Education Research Center Database (EdRC) data is a novel methodology for assessing RET programs' effectiveness on students. The EdRC is a repository of K-12 student data from the Texas Education Agency (TEA) and Higher Education data from the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB). This joint database contains demographic, course registration, graduation, standardized testing, and college major, among others, for all students that attended a K-12 public school in Texas and any college in Texas, public or private. The RET program participants at Rice University (2010 – 2018) taught numerous students, a sample size of 11,240 students. A propensity score matching generated the student comparison group within the database. Students' school campus, gender, race/ethnic status, and English proficiency status were applied to produce a graduation comparison sample size of 11,240 students of Non-RET participants. Linking the TEA database to the THECB database resulted in college STEM participants and comparison sample sizes of 4,029 students. The project team conducted a logistic regression using RET status to predict high school graduation rates as a whole and by individual variables: gender, Asian American, Black, Caucasian, and Latinx students. All models were significant at p less than 0.05, with models in favor of students RET teachers. The project team conducted a logistic regression using RET status to predict student STEM undergraduate major rates as a whole and by individual variables: Gender, Asian American, Black, Caucasian, and Latinx students. African American and Caucasian models were significant at p less than 0.05; Gender, Asian American, and Latinx models were marginally significant (0.05 less than p greater than 0.1), where RET students had higher STEM major rates than matched controls. The findings demonstrate that RET programs have a long-term positive impact on the students' high school graduation rates and undergraduate STEM major rates. As teachers who participate in the RET programs are more likely to conduct courses using PjBL strategies and incorporate real-world engineering practices, female and minority students are more likely to benefit from these practices and seek careers utilizing these skills. 

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5. National Science Foundation ATE Grant Funding and Mentoring Opportunities

   Greg Kepner (June 2022, Proceedings ASEE annual conference)

   The National Science Foundation Advanced Technological Education (NSF-ATE) program has grant funding opportunities available to support CTE and STEM technician program development. NSF-ATE grant funding opportunities are intended to help educators develop or improve their 2-year technician programs. Proposals may focus on program, curriculum, and educational materials development, program improvement, faculty professional development, teacher preparation, career pathways, outreach activities, undergraduate research experiences, internships, apprenticeships, and more. Partnerships with universities, colleges, and 7-12 institutions in support of workforce development are encouraged. Industry partnerships are essential for NSF-ATE projects. NSF-ATE supports Emerging Technologies and technologies such as Biotechnology, Engineering, Energy, Environmental, Agricultural, Advanced Manufacturing, Micro/Nano Technologies, Information, Security, and Geospatial. Multiple categories of NSF-ATE grant funding are available including Projects, Small Projects for Institutions New to ATE, Applied Research on Technician Education, National Centers, and Resource Centers. The new NSF-ATE solicitation (NSF 21-598) was released in 2021 and includes higher funding levels and multiple categories of grant funding opportunities, including a new Consortia for Innovations in Technician Education. NSF-ATE has some helpful resources for educators planning to develop or improve their courses or programs. Mentoring opportunities for grant proposal development are available through multiple projects such as Mentor-Connect, MNT-EC (Micro Nano Technology Education Center), Mentor Up, Project Vision, Pathways to Innovation, CCPISTEM, and FORCCE-ATE. Each of these projects has a unique approach and a different focus to help their mentees successfully submit NSF-ATE grant proposals. 

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