Iowa State has recently become the recipient of two grants amounting to $700,000.

A long-term partnership between ISU’s College of Education and the King-Perkins Elementary Schools in Des Moines has resulted in a $400,000 grant from the Exxon Education Foundation.

The grant will fund a math improvement project, called MathCo., to create a model teacher preparation and staff development program based on the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics curriculum and evaluation standards.

MathCo. is an outgrowth of “Project Opportunity” a cohort program in the department of curriculum instruction.

“The point of this project is to enhance teacher preparation through extended field time,” Janet Sharp, professor of curriculum and instruction in mathematics education and ISU director of MathCo., said.

Interested students apply to the cohort program as freshmen. If selected, the group of sophomores takes a series of courses for the next three years, one or two each semester.

The 28 cohort students who have been selected for MathCo. will receive mathematically enriched courses and spend 200 hours working at King-Perkins, a mathematics/science magnet school in downtown Des Moines.

“The project also will encourage the merging of teacher education and K-12 cultures as ISU faculty work and teach at King-Perkins, and King-Perkins teachers work and teach at ISU,” said E. Ann Thompson, professor of curriculum and instruction and ISU MathCo. director, in a press release.

Sharp said,”[The ISU students] will be seeing kindergarten through fifth grade teachers integrating math into all their lessons. These students will see mathematics through the next three years in a lot of integrated contexts.”

Chris Ohana, the science coordinator and MathCo. director at King Elementary said, “There’s a lot of evidence that minority children and also girls do better in math and science when…they do real-life problem solving so they see the context for math and science. This (project) will allow us to develop these connections.”

Additional benefits to King-Perkins listed by Ohana were improved access to research, more time to plan and prepare, more materials and opportunities to ” … learn some state-of-the-art mathematics education.”

ISU will also benefit from MathCo. Sharp said, “We’re finding out how does being in a cohort help student retention, how does it help them discuss their classes, do they feel more of a group from the beginning?”

“Many times college students feel isolated because it’s a whole different experience from high school, and we think the cohort really helps ease that,” she said.

“Plus another benefit will be the mathematics. We would like to see that our future teachers who graduate from Iowa State have great skill in math, and we think this project will help us do that,” Sharp said.

King-Perkins Principal and MathCo director Marlene Ann Doby said, “Any time that you are able to have an opportunity for teachers to advance themselves in math training, they will impart that to students.” This, in turn, “…improves students attitudes about math and test scores,” she said.

“I see a terrific potential for preservice teachers to grow professionally in math education. Time is built into the program,” Ohana said.

The Exxon grant will end in three years, but Sharp hopes to see the program maintained through other funding or by the department itself. “It’s a wonderful program,” she said.

Similarly, the Rockwell Trust Fund pledged $300,000 to Iowa State’s Analog and Mixed Signal Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) Circuit Design Center to further student training in this field.

“The VLSI area in general and the analog and mixed signal area in particular don’t have enough trained engineers in the world to design the circuits that are marketable,” electrical and computer engineering professor Randy Geiger said.

The center teaches students to design electronic computer chips like those found in computers and cellular telephones. The center also conducts research in the analog and mixed signal field, Geiger said.

Rockwell’s presence in the project is important because it is geographically the closest major company that works in this field, Geiger said.

At the end of September, Rockwell presented the center with the first of three $100,000 gifts that will be given over three years.

— Contributions to this story were made by Shawntelle Madison and Jessica Kearney