Designing effective educational initiatives for grant proposals

The National Science Foundation requires that grantees make an effort to extend the reach of academic research to communities beyond the laboratory and address the work's possible "Broader Impacts" to society. NSF CAREER awards and many of the NSF Research Center grant solicitations are even more explicit, requiring that grantees craft educational initiatives that are based in best practices, bring the academic research to the broader community, and positively impact the pipeline of students pursuing science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and careers. For new faculty, and even veteran faculty, these requirements for creative educational initiatives that significantly affect a community outside the confines of the laboratory can be very daunting. This paper addresses how to design an effective educational plan that incorporates undergraduate and graduate education or K-12 educational outreach and that will have a real impact on the target audience. It also gives advice, from the point of view of a former college president and NSF officer, about issues of the reward system in general, promotion and tenure at different types of higher education institutions in particular, and how these differing standards should be taken into account as one decides how much and what type of educational initiative should prudently be undertaken.