Impact Stories

About NSF

The U.S. National Science Foundation is an independent federal agency that supports science and engineering in all 50 states and U.S. territories. NSF was established in 1950 by Congress to promote the progress of science, advance the national health, prosperity and welfare, and secure the national defense. NSF investments unleash groundbreaking discoveries, translational solutions and expand participation in STEM.

About ECR:Core and ECR:BCSER

The EDU Core Research (ECR) program at NSF supports fundamental STEM education research and capacity-building projects to conduct such research, complementing the more applied focus of other NSF EDU programs.

Fundamental research projects are funded through the ECR:Core solicitation and capacity-building projects are funded through the ECR Building Capacity in STEM Education Research (BCSER) solicitation.

 

Learn more about the impacts of ECR:Core and ECR:BCSER projects below. 

Funding fromECR:Core
Supporting long-term student learning in math and science

A project creating a smart study tool that helps K-12 students truly remember what they learn in science and math classes, not just for a test, but for the long haul.

Funding fromBCSER:IID
Project Let's Talk Code

Project Let’s Talk Code was a Research Practitioner Partnership (RPP) that investigated and supported teachers in introducing computer science to high school students in the Four Corners region of the U.S. Let's Talk Code conducted nine professional development sessions for 119 non-computer science teachers across 34 schools, impacting 214 Native American students.

Funding fromECR:Core
Characterizing and assessing number sense in 3rd-8th grade students

Number sense is a key goal of mathematics education in the United States, but it is unclear if students' number sense is improving in 3rd-8th grade. This project developed a brief assessment of 3rd-8th grade students' number sense that is now an open-access, free-to-use resource for classroom teachers, educators, and researchers. 

Funding fromECR:Core
Using AI to advance elementary teacher instruction

We have developed models that can automatically classify activity structures and teaching activities in videos of elementary mathematics instruction. We drew on data that had been collected for a previous NSF study in Virginia, Michigan, and Connecticut.

Funding fromECR:Core
The development of gender stereotypes about STEM abilities

This project advanced scientific understanding about children’s gender stereotypes about STEM and verbal abilities by synthesizing more than four decades of studies. The compiled data represented more than 145,000 children across ages 4 to 17. Additionally, the synthesis was international in scope, including data from 33 nations.