The Energy Department has given $1.76 million to a Massachusetts-based education-research center to identify the best precollegiate mathematics and science education programs undertaken by the department’s national laboratories.
The four-year grant was awarded to the National Center for Improving Science Education, a division of The Network Inc.
The purpose of the grant, announced in late July, is to provide policymakers with examples of effective science curricula and assessments.
Since 1989, the department’s national labs have become more involved in cooperative programs with local schools. (See Education Week, Oct. 23, 1991, and May 13, 1992.)
More than 1 million students, teachers, and parents participated in some 800 department-funded science programs in 1991, according to a spokesman.
Some programs developed jointly by the laboratories and schools already have been adopted in other states.
This summer, for example, a group of teachers and administrators from across the country spent two weeks at the Pacific Northwest Laboratory to learn how to teach a course in materials and science technology.
The course was developed jointly by the laboratory and Steve Pippo, a teacher at Richland High School in Washington State and a participant in an Energy Department summer program.
It is now used by a dozen schools in Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.
