NITARP: Impact Assessment, 2005-2013

NITARP, the NASA/IPAC Training in Archival Research Program, gets educators involved in authentic astronomical research. We partner small groups of educators with a mentor professional astronomer for a year-long original research project. The educators incorporate the experience into their classrooms and share their experience with other teachers. The teams echo the entire research process, from writing a proposal, to doing the research, to writing up and presenting the results at an AAS meeting. The educators incorporate this experience into their classroom. This program differs from other programs that we know of that get real astronomy data into the classroom in that: (a) Each team works on an original, unique project. There are no canned labs here! (b) Each team presents their results in posters at the AAS, in science sessions (not just outreach sessions). The posters are distributed throughout the meeting, in amongst other researchers' work; the participants are not "given a free pass" because they are teachers. (c) The 'product' of this project is the scientific result, not a curriculum packet. (d) Because the teachers work with students throughout this project, the teachers have already begun to adapt their project to fit in their classroom environment. This poster will describe the program, with highlights of an impact assessment survey conducted of NITARP alumni in June 2013. Including all forms of the project from 2004-2013, there have been 80 educator participants from 33 states; 40 of them responded to our survey. There have been 37 science and 42 education AAS posters presented by NITARP-affiliated educators and scientists (with 8 more expected to be presented at this meeting). There have been 5 refereed journal articles in professional astronomy research journals that directly involve NITARP teachers and scientists (Howell et al. 2006, Guieu et al. 2010, Howell et al. 2008, Rebull et al., 2011, 2013), and 2 more astronomy journal articles describing the software developed in conjunction with NITARP and its Spitzer (Laher et al. 2012ab). There is one more refereed article written by a NITARP alumni teacher for The Physics Teacher (Pereira et al. 2013).