Paige Evans
University of Houston, TX·Education Research
Schools in low-income and high-need districts struggle to hire science and math teachers and to keep them. When good STEM teachers leave, students lose steady, skilled instruction.
- Fields
Education Research
Social Science
- Topics
STEM education
teacher retention
teacher effectiveness
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Sep 2028
What they work on
- Analyze how STEM teacher preparation programs across a multi-university network affect teacher placement and retention in high-need school districts, using quantitative trend analysis.
- Evaluate early-career STEM teachers' effectiveness with the Tripod student perception survey and a classroom observation protocol, and identify the program features linked to long-term effectiveness.
- Gather teachers' experiences through interviews and focus groups and combine them with quantitative data in a convergent parallel mixed-methods design.
- Track how a Community of Practice of teacher educators changes preparation programs and retention rates across participating institutions.
More about the research
Teacher preparation programs across the United States are trying to fix this, but there is limited shared evidence about which program features help teachers stay and teach well.
Why it matters
High-need schools often lose STEM teachers quickly, which hurts student learning. Evidence on which preparation features keep teachers in these classrooms and help them teach well could guide how universities recruit, train and support future teachers. That could benefit students in high-need districts and strengthen the STEM teaching workforce.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Loralyn Cozy
Illinois Wesleyan University, IL·Education Research
Recruit and retain at least 11 high-achieving undergraduates as Noyce Scholars preparing to become secondary STEM teachers over a six-year period.
Jan Yow
University of South Carolina-Columbia, SC·Education Research
Develop 16 STEM teacher leaders from five South Carolina school districts through a three-year Ed.D. STEM program and a two-year Action Research Implementation program.
Jeanna Wieselmann
Southern Methodist University, TX·Education Research
Develop two practice formats for preservice science teachers, AI-driven virtual reality avatar simulations and scaffolded peer teaching, to build skill in leading discussions of real-world scientific problems.
The school
University of Houston: 21 labs on PI Pages, $239M a year on research, 374 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
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