This grant provides scholarship funds for an anticipated 59 master’s and 20 Ph.D. students to be recruited and enrolled over the next three years by the four institutional partners in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership, a national network of four educational institutions that aim to increase the number of American Indians and Alaska Natives that obtain postgraduate degrees in STEM fields. The following is the expected breakdown of scholarships by campus:  $385,200 to the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks); $712,500 to the University of Arizona; $620,000 to the Montana University system; and $353,338 to Purdue University.  Scholarships in the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership are administered and disbursed by the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

This grant provides support to Purdue University for its administrative, organizational, and infrastructure costs associated with the continued operation of the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership (SIGP), a national network of four universities and university systems that aim to increase the number of indigenous Americans and Alaska Natives that obtain postgraduate degrees in STEM fields.  Over the next three years the SIGP institutions—Purdue University, University of Arizona, the University of Alaska (Anchorage and Fairbanks), and the University of Montana system (University of Montana, Montana Tech, and Montana State University)—plan to recruit 59 talented American Indian or Native Alaska students into STEM master’s programs and 20 students into STEM Ph.D. programs.  Grant funds will support SIGP partner institutions as they engage in various administrative and infrastructure-building activities over the next three years, including community-building; collection, sharing, and analysis of data on student outcomes and programmatic effectiveness; and the launch of a new intercampus student exchange program.  Scholarship funds for students supported through the SIGP program are provided through a separate grant to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering.

This grant provides three years of continuing support to the National Action Council for Minorities in Engineering to administer scholarships for graduate students supported through the Foundation’s Minority Ph.D. program and the Sloan Indigenous Graduate Partnership.  Funded activities include the timely execution of scholarship payments, accurate accounting of scholarship disbursements and balances, data collection on supported students, filing regular reports to the Foundation on scholarship disbursements, maintenance of the program’s website and associated forms, and the production of a series of webinars aimed at supported scholars.

For those interested in the “science of learning,” the book called How People Learn has been a bible.  This report is one of the most successful ever produced by the National Academies Press, selling nearly 150,000 hard copies on top of many free downloads.  A distinguished National Research Council committee of cognitive neuroscientists, developmental psychologists, and educational experts succeeded in distilling and documenting key research findings, a series of practical applications of these findings, and an agenda for further research.  Funds from this grant support a project by the National Academy of Science to publish an updated second edition of How People Learn, fifteen years after its original publication.  The new edition will cover the latest research in fields such as cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics, developmental psychology, and learning technologies. Though the updated report will address the full spectrum of learning from “K to gray,” Sloan funding will specifically support work on topics related to postsecondary education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.