From the Dean’s Desk

Dear Friends and Alumni,

I cannot remember an educated person telling me that she dislikes reading or that he really isn’t a “book” kind of guy. Instead, we pride ourselves on our literacy skills and can hardly imagine life without being able to read well, to analyze print, to make and derive meaning from words. Numeracy and scientific literacy, however, are less valued by our culture — even by those who are well-educated. I have heard graduate students openly proclaim they aren’t good with numbers and thus rely only on qualitative research to understanding the world. Parents widely admit that they cannot help even their upper elementary school children with math homework. Scientific knowledge is distrusted by many, in part perhaps because of the changing nature of the various sciences, where knowledge grows by leaps and bounds as new data are presented and old “truths” are shown to be only partially true or perhaps disproved entirely.

The University of Idaho is working hard to ensure that its graduates are literate in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. And the College of Education is working especially hard to ensure that our graduates advance STEM education in whatever career they enter, but especially in K-12 classrooms. In this edition of Envision, you’ll read about the University’s new STEM Education director, Melinda Hamilton, formerly a bench scientist with Idaho National Lab in Idaho Falls. And, you’ll read about Anne Adams and her colleagues in U-Idaho’s Department of Mathematics and at Washington State University, who are regularly in schools to help teachers more deeply understand the mathematical concepts they teach in their classrooms. In the third year of their three-year grant, participating teachers say this work has deepened their knowledge and changed their skills as teachers of math. While our latest magazine doesn’t exclusively address STEM education, I think you’ll be impressed by the depth of our STEM education expertise and the breadth of our efforts.

Our primary STEM goal, and that of many across the state and the nation, is to increase the numbers of students pursuing STEM degrees. A quick glance at the Idaho Department of Education’s STEM website will provide you with numerous reasons why our efforts are critical: http://bit.ly/ IdahoSTEM. You’ll see that America’s STEM degree numbers are declining while those in other parts of the world are rapidly increasing. Even in this country, for example, more than half of the degrees in engineering are awarded to foreign students.

In order to compete in what has become a very globally competitive world, we must become a society that values numeracy, technology skills and scientific literacy in the same way we highly value reading, writing and print literacy. At the University of Idaho, we take this charge seriously, and in the College of Education, we’re doing everything we can to contribute to this goal.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading about our efforts. Sending you warm spring greetings,

Cori Mantle-Bromley, Dean