Chemical Education Today
Report
Exploring the NSF Education Web Sites Donald J. Wink
The National Science Foundation has an active and important World Wide Web site for science researchers and educators. The site contains information on all NSF programs, including some information that cannot be accessed easily any other way. To help you to use this site effectively, the Journal has started this feature. Each month, I will describe an aspect of the site that is important for chemical educators, including updates on breaking events, new programs, and new publications from the NSF. This month I begin by laying out the organization of the site and discussing the three programs with deadlines this year. First, though, let me make a couple of notes about the NSF Web site itself. It is one that must serve several functions, due to NSF’s role in providing grant support for programs in all areas of science, mathematics, education and technology research, and education. The NSF and the Web site, in particular, are rich sources of information. Some of this information is only available on the Web. NSF’s many roles are not always well differentiated on the Web, and one of the goals of this Journal feature is to point out easily-overlooked pockets of information. The Web site has apparently been built by many different authors. So when you browse it, you are in for a varied experience. This can be very interesting, but it also means that the universal resource locators (URL’s) are not presented uniformly. In some cases, the file name has an extension of “htm”; in other cases, “html” is used. And capitalization can be important, too. I have presented the correct spelling and file names as of January 1998. Education at the NSF: Key Structures and Sites The Foundation is organized into Directorates and Offices, each charged with one or more areas of basic or ap-
plied research or with educational initiatives. There are also some Foundation-wide initiatives that are important for their support of educational programs. If you are going to start exploring the resources of the NSF Web site, I recommend that you go directly to the page for the Directorate for Education and Human Resources. Its divisions contain most of the education-related material at NSF. In Table 1, the Directorate’s structure is presented with a web site listing for each Division. There are important Directorate-wide pages. One is the standard home page; a second contains descriptions of the Divisions; and a third has the Directorate’s Programs by name. Any of the three will link you to the correct pages within the Directorate. Of course, if you are interested in a particular Division, you may want to go directly there. The NSF does not just run educational programs through its EHR directorate. Several basic research arms have some role to play, especially in the support of student research experiences. For that reason, I have collected some other relevant sites in Table 2. Listed there is the site for information on the “Research Experiences for Undergraduates” and two new programs on the integration of research and education. Finally, as I suggested, the NSF site is a very good place to find out things about science and engineering in the nation. In Table 3, I list some places to begin if you are interested in what the NSF has to tell you about science itself. There are good pages for students, teachers, and the general public to get information about non-NSF science sites. Breaking News at NSF: The New Division of Undergraduate Education Program Structure The major impetus behind this feature is to keep the readers of the Journal up-to-date on new programs and ma-
Table 1. Division Structure of the Directorate for Education and Human Resources Web Page Title
URL
Comments
Explanation of Directorate Division Structure
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/division.htm
Lists Divisions, with explanations of each division mission
Listing of Directorate Programs
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/prog.htm
Lists program titles, with links to relevant divisions
Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUE/start.htm
Division of Graduate Education (DGE)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DGE/dge.htm
Experimental Program To Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/EPSCOR/start.htm
Division of Elementary, Secondary, and Informal Education (ESIE)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/ESIE/index.html
Division of Educational Systemic Reform (ESR)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/ESR/index.htm
Division of Human Resource Development
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/HRD/
Division of Research, Evaluation and Communication (REC)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/REC/
EPSCoR also has components supporting basic research in targeted states. You may link to those from the EHR EPSCoR site.
JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu • Vol. 75 No. 4 April 1998 • Journal of Chemical Education
405
Chemical Education Today
Report
terial on the NSF web site. That will be the most common item in coming months. But an important new item has recently appeared, and I want to close by featuring it. This is the publication NSF No. 98-45, which describes revamped programs for NSF’s Division of Undergraduate Education. It was just issued this past January and contains major changes from previous years. The guidelines are available in hardcopy, but the html version available on the Web is much easier to use since one can link from program to
program easily. Table 4 contains the names of the major programs, and the deadlines for them. I also provide the url for the Shaping the Future report that spurred many of these changes (see J. Chem. Educ. 1997, 74, 1381 for an editorial on Shaping the Future). Donald J. Wink is in the Department of Chemistry, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607; email:
[email protected] Table 2. Interdisciplinary Sites with Programs Relevant to Chemical Education Web Page Title
URL
Research Experiences for Undergraduates
http://www.nsf.gov/home/crssprgm/reu/start.htm This site is part of the cross-foundation programs.
Comments
Learning and Intelligent Systems
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/lis/
This is a site for research in technologyrelated programs, including research on learning and technology. It functions partly within EHR, but actually spans the whole NSF.
Office of Science & Technology Infrastructure
http://www.nsf.gov/od/osti/
OSTI has assumed a role for initiatives on the integration of research and education. Two programs (AIRE: Awards for the Integration of Research and Integration at Baccalaureate Institutions and CIRE: Collaboratives to Inte-grate Research and Education) have recently had preliminary application deadlines pass.
Table 3. Informational Sites Web Page Title
URL
Comments
For Students
http://www.nsf.gov/home/students/start.htm
This is one of the better pages for educators to find things for student assignments. Fellowship information is also present here.
For Teachers
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/teachlinks.htm
Science in the Home
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/ehr/ehr/scihome.htm
Science Museums
http://red.www.nsf.gov/EHR/ESIE/museums.html
Table 4. Important Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) Publications Web Page Title
URL
Shaping the Future Report
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/ehr/due/documents/review/96139/start.htm
Division of Undergraduate Education Program Announcement and Guidelines
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUe/documents/general/gpag.htm and http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUe/documents/general/9845/start.htm
Collaboratives for Excellence in Teacher Preparation (CETP)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUe/documents/general/9845/cetp9845.htm
Preliminary proposal deadline: May 1, 1998
Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUe/documents/general/ccli9845.htm
Proposal deadlines: November 16, 1998
Advanced Technological Education (ATE)
http://www.ehr.nsf.gov/EHR/DUe/documents/general/9845/ate9845.htm
Preliminary proposal deadline: April 15, 1998
406
Journal of Chemical Education • Vol. 75 No. 4 April 1998 • JChemEd.chem.wisc.edu
Comments
