Photo Credit: G. Oehlschlager / CIERA
The CIERA GK-12 Reach for the Stars program is no longer active. However, lessons plans are available on the Reach for the Stars website.
This NSF program placed STEM graduate student fellows in K-12 science classrooms for the academic year with the goal of enriching their education and strengthening their development as researchers by advancing their communication and teaching skills.
Graduate fellows worked in partnership with a collaborating teacher to bring more inquiry-based teaching methods into the classroom and to further expose K-12 teachers and students to the research process.
Through Reach for the Stars, GK-12 fellows adapted concepts of computational thinking and actual computational modeling tools from their research to classroom activities connected to the existing math and science curriculum.
Over the years, our fellows put together lesson plans, on a wide variety of topics, that are free to download for use in your classroom.
The Research Communications Training Program (RCTP) was developed as a part of this Reach for the Stars program and ran for 4 years with NSF funding. RCTP is now regularly offered through The Graduate School as part of their professional development opportunities for graduate students and postdocs.
Reach for the Stars was a GK-12 program supported by the National Science Foundation under grant DGE-0948017. However, any opinions, findings, conclusions, and/or recommendations are those of the investigators and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
