The School for Science and Math at Vanderbilt (SSMV) is an innovative partnership program between a Research I private university and a large urban public school system. The SSMV was started in 2007 and currently has 101 students enrolled in the program, with a total of 60 students who have completed the 4-yr sequential program. Students attend the SSMV for one full day per week during the school year and 3–6 wk in the summers following their ninth- to 11th-grade years, with each grade of 26 students coming to the Vanderbilt campus on a separate day. The research-based curriculum focuses on guiding students through the process of learning to develop questions and hypotheses, designing projects and performing analyses, and communicating results of these projects. The SSMV program has elevated the learning outcomes of students as evidenced by increased achievement scores relative to a comparison group of students; has provided a rigorous research-based science, technology, engineering, and mathematics elective curriculum that culminates in a Summer research internship; has produced 27 Intel and Siemens semifinalists and regional finalists over the past 4 yr; and has supported the development of writing and communication skills resulting in regional and national oral presentations and publications in scientific journals.

Vol. 13, No. 2

June 01, 2014

159-359

Supplemental Materials

Metrics

Downloads & Citations

Downloads: 411

Citations: 9

History

Submitted: 31 May 2013

Revised: 21 March 2014

Accepted: 21 March 2014

Information

© 2014 A. Eeds et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2014 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution–Noncommercial–Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project was supported in part by Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) grant R25 RR024261 from the National Center for Research Resources, a component of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Study data were collected and managed using Research Electronic Data Capture (REDCap) electronic data-capture tools (Harris et al., 2009) hosted by the Vanderbilt Institute for Clinical and Translational Research, supported by grant UL1 TR000445 from the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS)/NIH. REDCap is a secure, Web-based application designed to support data capture for research studies, providing: 1) an intuitive interface for validated data entry; 2) audit trails for tracking data manipulation and export procedures; 3) automated export procedures for seamless data downloads to common statistical packages; and 4) procedures for importing data from external sources.

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