The goals of the education program in the proposed CREST Center are to:

1. Increase the constituent pool of secondary school students willing to study STEM subjects;
2. Increase the numbers of African American, Hispanic, and other minority students who choose to study STEM subjects;
3. Enhance the educational achievements and research experiences of participating undergraduate and graduate students;
4. Significantly increase the numbers of students undertaking doctoral level study in STEM fields.

The goals and objectives of the outreach program of the proposed CREST center will address issues associated with the underrepresentation of minorities in STEM careers by attacking the barriers to the study of STEM disciplines through the development of lectures, presentations, demonstrations, field trips and other activities designed to bring awareness of the problem to the community, parents, and other educational stakeholders. Workshops and presentations to stakeholders and interest groups will be made on the following:

1. Outreach to high school teachers and students and the “ninth-grade-hump.” The ninth grade is a critical transition point for young African American students. Converting negative peer pressure into positive peer pressure requires planning and coordination with the public schools;
2. Outreach to teachers on the manner of presentation mathematics and the quantitative sciences, which tends to develop a phobia in students that is later acted on in college. This is a barrier for students. One community college teacher stated in a mathematics teacher workshop held at TSU that "mathematics is the most hated course in the curriculum."
3. Outreach to teachers on the perception by teachers of students. The perception of teachers, as to who will and who will not be able to handle a school subject, is a serious impediment to the study of STEM in college;
4. Outreach to teachers and schools with weak school science and mathematics curricula. African American high school students often do not take full curricula in science and mathematics. Often this is because of financial constraints and the shortfall of STEM teachers. In part, it may also be due to the assumption that many school counselors and teachers have that African American and Hispanic children cannot achieve “higher order thinking” skills and advise them out of such classes.

Regardless of the root cause of the shortfall in STEM students, the proposed CREST center will focus on affecting academic outcomes at one high school. The primary outreach activity will be the “Walk across the Street Demonstration Project.” The goal of this demonstration program is to connect college teachers and students with high school teachers and students at Jack Yates High School adjacent to TSU in an intervention activity in English, reading, mathematics and problem solving. The intervention is to help students in the major feeder schools of TSU to begin to overcome deficiencies early and encourage them to study STEM subjects.

A new Department of Environmental Science and Technology has been established and the existing Ph.D. degree program in Environmental Toxicology is now housed in that department. This Ph.D. degree program, together with other existing M.S. degree programs in Computer Science, Transportation Planning and Management, and Mathematic, will be strengthened to include the use of networks for monitoring the environment and high performance computers for simulation of the environment and other complex systems. In addition, a new program in Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) offering the M.S. degree will be developed and implemented during the project period of the funded CRCN. Students in the graduate programs will have at least one year in the fundamental sciences, physics, engineering technology; they will have specialized science courses in the direction of their focus. They will have mathematics through partial differential equations, numerical analysis computational fluid dynamics, and modeling. Students will have close faculty mentoring and participate in the enhanced scholarship including, but not limited to, seminars addressing contemporary science issues, the literature of science, the multidisciplinary nature of science and the use of high performance computing, wireless sensor networks, and computational simulations.

The research experiences for undergraduates and graduate students component is designed to allow students to participate in research each year under the guidance of faculty members. Students will have to do research, provide a formal seminar on his/her work, and write a final report. The level of the research will at a higher level for graduate students than for undergraduates. However, participation by both in a large project will develop the skills of teamwork necessary in professional work. For example, students in environmental science are currently monitoring a network of sensors for volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the Houston area. VOC emissions are extremely complex dynamic phenomena. Students are analyzing the data, and designing computational models of the transport phenomena, and investigating the impact. VOCs are a major concern since Houston is one of the largest petrochemical manufacturing areas in the world. There are many research issues to be addressed in this area. One of these areas is the pollution caused by the transportation system. The urban transportation environmental network (UTEN) is addressing a complex environmental problem to which students will devote considerable attention.

Students will gain hands-on experience in the remote accessible wireless sensor network laboratory and will learn how to design and program wireless sensor node and use them to monitor environmental phenomena. Workshops on EEWSNs that examine the development of real applications in the environment and methods and practices utilizing its enabling technologies will be held. Students will also be exposed to the most current methods for managing and utilizing high performance computing methods for transmitting, collecting, and analyzing data from WSNs. Students will be exposed to the latest techniques for measuring and monitoring environmental phenomena.

TSU has established a relationship with Jack Yates High School (see attached commitment letter), which has a contiguous boundary with TSU. The intervention will establish relationships with high school students prior to their matriculation in TSU and will be a major recruiting tool for College of Science and Technology (COST). Every week a professor and a student from the proposed CREST center will spend 2 hours in classroom interaction with teachers and students at Yates. The objective is to present encouragement and enhancement of science and mathematics education to promising students. The following is a list of student training programs to be implemented.

• College Faculty Support. Every week a professor from TSU will spend 2 hours in classroom interaction with teachers and students at Yates. The objective is to present encouragement and enhancement of science and mathematics education to promising students.
• After School Program. The after school program will be implemented during the school year, which is intended to supplement and enhance the science, mathematics and technological literacy of students who are potential COST students from Yates and other local high schools. Since many of these students will enroll in TSU, this activity will inform them and make them comfortable about the study of STEM subjects. Students will be recruited from each level of the high school and encouraged to study STEM at TSU. This initiative will address 100 students, 25 from each grade level 9, 10, 11, and 12. Supplementary education in science and mathematics will be provided for two hours after school. This educational effort will not only enhance skills, it will be directed toward developing interest in the study of science and mathematics in COST.
• The Early Bird Summer Program. This program is designed to recruit minority 9th graders (20 each year for 5 years) for early entrance into college at TSU. This program is designed for students during the summers between the 9th and 10th grades, the 10th and 11th grades, and the 11th and 12th grades. They will be eligible for admission to TSU with advanced standing for some courses and, more importantly, they will have personal experience with the STEM program at TSU.
• National Conference on STEM Pedagogy. The proposed CREST center will hold national conferences on STEM pedagogy starting in the second year of the proposed project. The purpose is to open a discourse on issues involved in the methods of teaching quantitative science courses. In this regard, COST held the first such conference on March 25, 2011 to begin the dialog with local secondary school educators as its initial effort in this initiative.
• Institutional Management and Evaluation. The educational program will be under the control of the Center’s administrative committee. Because of the amount of time that will be required to manage the proposed program, some committee members will have their fulltime teaching loads reduced by one-quarter to one-half. It is intended that the planning and evaluation of the project be conducted utilizing contemporary tools and methodologies, leading to, for example, an analysis of the strength, weakness, opportunity and threat (SWOT) parameters as they pertain to the establishment of operational objectives for the educational program.

In the proposal, we envision that a total of 9 graduate students per year and 6 undergraduate students per year will be recruited and supported by CRCN over five years. We have developed a highly structured plan for recruiting and mentoring students. One source of potential graduate students is the existing Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP) program at TSU, which has been quite successful and productive. The TSU President has made recruitment a high priority, through installing dedicated recruiters, in addition to the individual efforts that are made by faculty members.