Welcome to KU-Greenbush "BET 4 Teachers"

BioEngineering Toolkits for 4th Grade Teachers

"BET 4 Teachers" is an NSF funded RET (Research Experience for Teachers) program that is a collaborative effort between the University of Kansas BioEngineering faculty (http://www.bio.engr.ku.edu/) and the faculty of the Science Education Center which is part of the Southeast Kansas Education Service Center-Greenbush (www.greenbush.org). In the first four weeks of this RET program, teachers working under supervision of faculty members and graduate students at KU, will conduct bioengineering research and develop hands-on interactive toolkits for their elementary classrooms. These toolkits will expose students to bioengineering principles at the elementary level and will encourage the girls and minority students to see themselves in the roll of a scientist or engineer in a field that does not suffer from lack of participation of females and minorities. The teachers and graduate students will then refine their toolkits by working with education experts from Greenbush and further disseminate it by presenting workshops to other science teachers from across the state. By targeting 4th grade teachers, we hope to positively impact students' self-perception before they have had time to adopt the stereotypic descriptions of scientists and engineers. We hypothesize that this influence at the critical age will carry through the students' academic career and make both female and male students more likely to pursue careers in engineering or science, regardless of the discipline.

The application for this opportunity can be found here.