CELEST Education Goals

The CELEST Education Thrust will focus on:

Graduate and Undergraduate Curriculum Development. Many courses in CELEST departments will be revised or created to include new material about learning. The CELEST graduate courses will be used as incubators wherein all students will participate in a class project to create modules aimed at future incorporation into K-12 curriculum materials, notably web-based materials. CELEST students will visit Boston-areas classrooms to become sensitized to the work level of their target student audiences. These initial modules will be progressively refined until they are ready to be published online.
Curriculum Development and Web-Based Outreach. CELEST will create new 7-12, undergraduate, and graduate-level curricula, based on recent advances in modeling how the brain learns to control behavior. Curricula will also be of use to professionals and the general public. Such curricula can excite and motivate students to learn about themselves, and begin to redress the imbalance between teaching of the physical sciences versus the sciences of biological intelligence. They can also inspire students to learn more mathematics and science, and to enter previously unconsidered careers, including careers in teaching. CELEST-developed curricula will include interdisciplinary information that unifies behavioral data, brain data, theoretical concepts, mathematical models, and computational methods, all calibrated to the skill level of the intended audience. CELEST will create an online resource for faculty, teachers, and students that will provide tools for editing and disseminating curriculum modules with online assessments, searchable by standard, topic, or keyword, and computer-based modeling tool downloads.
Workbooks and Textbooks. Workbooks for high school, undergraduate, graduate, professionals and the general public will be written on topics showing how mathematical models can explain fascinating properties of mind and brain. In addition, mathematics textbooks on differential equations will be updated to include mathematical models of brain and behavior.
Professional Development Workshops. Beginning in the summer of 2007, CELEST will host annual workshops for secondary teachers and undergraduate teaching faculty. These workshops will recruit participants from around the nation and will focus on incorporation of models of how the brain learns to behave into secondary and undergraduate courses. CELEST will also host workshops at teacher conferences (e.g., National Science Teachers Association and National Association of Biology Teachers).
Preservice Professional Development. Through a collaboration with the Boston University School of Education, graduate students in science education will be provided with graduate-level credit for taking undergraduate CELEST courses with the added requirement of the development of a K-12 curriculum module. A second-semester directed research project for selected graduate students in education will be offered whereby they conduct a pilot and classroom test of their curricular application in collaborating schools.
Summer Research Programs. CELEST will offer research-based summer programs for secondary teachers, undergraduate students, and high school students (through the CELEST Diversity Committee), including hosting teachers as part of a Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) program, undergraduate students as part of a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF), and high school students as part of a new SURF-H program for Boston-area minority students. All three efforts will be coordinated with other summer educational offerings for students.
"GK-12" Outreach. Graduate students in the sciences typically do not have first-hand experience of the problems faced by K-12 teachers. Consistent with the goals of the NSF GK-12 Program, CELEST graduate students will contribute towards the challenge of affecting change at the K-12 level. Generally, graduate students can: (a) impart science expertise to teachers and students, (b) convey to students the connection between science research and science education, and (c) dispel myths of who a scientist is and what a scientist does. Specifically, CELEST graduate students will work closely with participating teachers to pilot- and classroom-test CELEST K-12 curriculum materials and to work towards integration into existing courses.
High School Outreach. CELEST will additionally outreach to high schools by building on the success of the Math Field Days that have been running for the past twelve years at Boston University. Over 1,000 area high school students from New England participate each year in these events. Another 1,000 students attend Field Days at remote locations. At first, CELEST researchers will be trained to give presentations at these events, and then in Year 3 and the following years, special Field Days dedicated entirely to neural systems will be organized as part of the Boston University LERNet outreach program. In addition, CELEST will participate in the Boston University Pathways Program: two daylong programs designed for young women in high school who are interested in science, mathematics and engineering. The format is designed to encourage interaction between the students and female scientists, and to familiarize them with the variety of careers in these fields.