CoME and SEE SC

This project (Combating Misinformation through Education and Scientific Experiential Exposure in South Carolina; CoME and SEE SC) is focused on (1) developing scientific literacy and (2) establishing a module for testing and teaching of scientific literacy in an outreach program. This module will be posted online, widely available to the public. Undergraduate and graduate students are guided in learning scientific literacy, with a focus on variables hindering participation from SC citizens in best practices for the management of COVID-19, thus being good scientific citizens. This student team is working to critically analyze which techniques were most helpful to their own improvement and begin to develop a three-hour or less module to teach local high school science teachers. Emphasis is on developing simple experiments that can be integrated into a classroom for each of the core sciences: biology, physics, and chemistry. Specifically, we aim to integrate these modules with our RET teachers (below).

Funded by the National Science Foundation CAREER Program

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Research Experiences for Teachers

We provide teachers a research experience in my laboratory or another laboratory in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, with support from South Carolina’s Research Experiences for Teachers and the SC EPSCoR office. Teachers receive CoME and SEE SC professional development, with the support of Dr. Christopher White, Department Head of Science at Seneca High School. We assess changing attitudes towards the nature of science of high school students taught by participating teachers before and after the integration of CoME AND SEE SC. We hypothesize that our program will increase student and teacher confidence in the reliability of scientific information by increasing knowledge of the scientific process.

Funded by the National Science Foundation CAREER Program