BHEF, OSU’s Battelle Center Introduce Effort To Help States Bolster STEM Education

Columbus, Ohio (March 3, 2010) — The Business-Higher Education Forum (BHEF) and The Ohio State University’s (OSU) Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy today jointly held a workshop on the OSU campus to introduce a new project that will develop powerful new analytic tools designed to help states strengthen science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education across the pre-kindergarten through graduate-school pipeline.  

The goal of the STEManalytics Project is to help states develop and use modeling and other analytic tools to identify policies that can help achieve state goals for STEM education, workforce quality, and economic growth.  This effort will benefit policymakers and educators in examining state-based STEM education reform initiatives and their link to state economic and workforce goals. Ohio is serving as the initial pilot for the development of the STEManalytics suite. The workshop provided an opportunity for other states to learn more about the project and to explore the potential to develop a similar project in their state.

“Improving the STEM workforce as a means of increasing a state’s innovative capacity and economic competitiveness lies at the top of virtually every governor’s agenda, but few efforts to date have a comprehensive focus that ties workforce needs to improvements in the entire P-20 STEM education pipeline, generates broad policy consensus among key stakeholders and directs investments to the highest impact points in the STEM education pipeline,” says BHEF Executive Director Brian K. Fitzgerald. “We are pleased to have this opportunity to partner with our members Gordon Gee at The Ohio State University and Jeffrey Wadsworth at Battelle Memorial Institute and leaders from their respective institutions to address these goals.”

The STEManalytics Project incorporates BHEF’s U.S. STEM Education Model, as well as other simulation models and tools such as the T21-Ohio Model developed by OSU’s Center for Resilience, to accomplish this goal. The BHEF U.S. STEM Education Model is a simulation model of the U.S. STEM education system developed by Raytheon and donated to BHEF in July 2009. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation recently awarded BHEF a $417,517 grant to allow BHEF and OSU to advance these modeling and simulation efforts.

The workshop followed a public awareness campaign kicked off by Ohio Governor Ted Strickland that aims to elevate the importance of STEM across the state. As one of the original six National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) STEM states, the event highlighted Ohio’s efforts as well as other efforts of the other NGA STEM Centers in Colorado, Pennsylvania and Virginia.