May 09, 2006

For Phase 1 proposals from submitting organizations located in states or territories beginning with A through M.

May 10, 2006

For Phase 1 proposals from submitting organizations located in states or territories beginning with N through W.

January 10, 2007

For Phase 2 and 3 proposals.

In furtherance of the President's Management Agenda, in Fiscal Year 2006, NSF has identified programs that will offer proposers the option to utilize Grants.gov to prepare and submit proposals, or will require that proposers utilize Grants.gov to prepare and submit proposals. Grants.gov provides a single Government-wide portal for finding and applying for Federal grants online.

Proposers may opt to submit proposals in response to this Program Solicitation via Grants.gov or via the NSF FastLane system. In determining which method to utilize in the electronic preparation and submission of the proposal, please note the following:

1. Collaborative Proposals. All collaborative proposals must be submitted via the NSF FastLane system. This includes collaborative proposals submitted:

• by one organization (and which include one or more subawards); or
• as separate submissions from multiple organizations.

Proposers are advised that collaborative proposals submitted in response to this Program Solicitation via Grants.gov will be requested to be withdrawn and proposers will need to resubmit these proposals via FastLane. (Chapter II, Section D.3 of the Grant Proposal Guide provides additional information on collaborative proposals.)

2. All Other Types of Proposals That Contain Subawards. All other types of proposals that contain one or more subawards also must be submitted via the NSF FastLane system. (Chapter II, Section C.2.g.(vi)(e) of the Grant Proposal Guide provides additional information on subawards.)

The following items are major revisions to the previous program solicitation:

The additional review criteria in Section VI.A have been revised.

This solicitation allows letters showing collaborator commitments and organizational endorsement and samples of final products as supplementary documents. The sample materials should be concise and relevant.

Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI)

The Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program seeks to improve the quality of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for all undergraduate students. The program supports efforts to create new learning materials and teaching strategies, develop faculty expertise, implement educational innovations, assess learning and evaluate innovations, and conduct research on STEM teaching and learning. The program supports three types of projects representing three different phases of development, ranging from small, exploratory investigations to large, comprehensive projects.

The vision of the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program is excellent science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education for all undergraduate students. Towards this vision the program supports projects based on high-quality science, technology, engineering or mathematics and recent advances in research on undergraduate STEM learning and teaching. The program seeks to stimulate, disseminate, and institutionalize innovative and effective developments in undergraduate STEM education through the introduction of new content reflecting cutting edge developments in STEM fields, the production of knowledge about learning, and the improvement of educational practice. The CCLI program design reflects current challenges and promising approaches reported in recent seminal meetings and publications sponsored by organizations concerned with the health of national STEM education.

The National Research Council (NRC) notes several challenges to effective undergraduate education in STEM disciplines. These challenges include providing engaging laboratory, classroom and field experiences; teaching large numbers of students from diverse backgrounds; improving assessment of learning outcomes; and informing science faculty about research on effective teaching (2003, "Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics," http://www.nap.edu/books/0309072778/html/).

Promising approaches to meeting these challenges have been identified by several national organizations. The NRC emphasizes the importance of teaching subject matter in depth, eliciting and working with students' preexisting knowledge, and helping students develop the skills of self-monitoring and reflection (2005, “How Students Learn”, http://www.nap.edu/books/0309074339/html/ and 2000, “How People Learn” http://books.nap.edu/catalog/9853/html). They further emphasize the importance of creating a body of knowledge about effective practices in STEM undergraduate education (“a STEM education knowledge base”) and of creating a community of scholars who can act as resources for each other and for those seeking information.

The NRC also describes several strategies for improving the assessment of learning outcomes. They recommend that research on effective teaching should: pose significant questions that can be investigated using empirical techniques; have the potential for replication and generalization across educational settings; and be publicized and subjected to professional critique (2002 “Scientific Research in Education", http://www.nap.edu/books/0309082919/html/).

The value of working with a community of people within or across specific STEM disciplines, or pursuing similar educational innovations, is highlighted in a recent report from Project Kaleidoscope that calls for “collective action” to share ideas and materials so that projects build on, connect to, and enhance the work of others (Project Kaleidoscope, 2002, “Recommendations for Action in Support of Undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics,” http://www.pkal.org/documents/ReportonReports.pdf). The need for collective action is also emphasized in a report from the National Academies (2003, "Improving Undergraduate Instruction in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics," (http://www.nap.edu/books/0309089298/html), which identifies the importance of expanding faculty and scholarly networks to promote effective instruction and to support rapid dissemination and adaptation of successful educational innovations.

The CCLI Program acknowledges the need both for the development of exemplary courses and teaching practices and for assessment and research efforts in undergraduate STEM education that build on and contribute to the pool of knowledge concerning effective approaches in STEM undergraduate education. The Program recognizes the value of a cadre of STEM faculty committed to improving undergraduate STEM education and sharing their findings with each other, "the community of scholars" described by Project Kaleidoscope. The report "Invention and Impact: Building Excellence in Undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics Education" (2005, http://www.aaas.org/publications/books_reports/CCLI) describes some of the successful efforts supported by the CCLI program and its predecessors (the Course and Curriculum Development (CCD), Instruction and Laboratory Improvement (ILI), and Undergraduate Faculty Enhancement (UFE) programs). It is based on knowledge shared at a 2004 meeting of Principal Investigators from these programs.

The CCLI program is based on a cyclic model depicting the relationship between knowledge production and improvement of practice in undergraduate STEM education. The model is adapted from the report, “Mathematical Proficiency for All Students” (see http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR1643/). In this model, research findings about learning and teaching challenge existing approaches, thus leading to new educational materials and teaching strategies. New materials and teaching strategies that show promise give rise to faculty development programs and methods that incorporate these materials. The most promising of these developments are first tested in limited environments and then implemented and adapted in diverse curricula and educational institutions. These innovations are carefully evaluated by assessing their impact on teaching and learning. In turn, these implementations and assessments generate new insights and research questions, initiating a new cycle of innovation.

1. Project Components

All proposals must contribute to the development of exemplary undergraduate STEM education. Proposals may focus on one or more of the components of this cycle.

• Creating Learning Materials and Teaching Strategies. Guided by research on teaching and learning, by evaluations of previous efforts, and by advances within the disciplines, projects should develop new learning materials and tools, or create new and innovative teaching methods and strategies. Projects may also revise or enhance existing educational materials and teaching strategies, based on prior results. All projects should lead to exemplary models that address the varied needs of the Nation's diverse undergraduate student population. They may include activities that help faculty develop expertise in adapting these innovations and incorporating them effectively into their courses, the next step in the cycle.

• Developing Faculty Expertise. Using new learning materials and teaching strategies often requires faculty to acquire new knowledge and skills and to revise their curricula and teaching practices. Projects should design and implement methods that enable faculty to gain such expertise. These can range from short-term workshops to sustained activities that foster new communities or networks of practicing educators. Successful projects should provide professional development for a diverse group of faculty so that new materials and teaching strategies can be widely implemented.

• Implementing Educational Innovations. To ensure their broad based adoption, successful educational innovations (such as learning materials, teaching strategies, faculty development materials, assessment and evaluation tools) and the research relating to them should be widely disseminated. These innovations may come from CCLI projects or from other sources in the STEM community. Funds may be requested for local adaptation and implementation projects, including instrumentation to support such projects. Results from implementation projects should illuminate the challenges to and opportunities for adapting innovations in diverse educational settings, and may provide a foundation for the development of new tools and processes for dissemination. They also may provide a foundation for assessments of learning and teaching.

• Assessing Learning and Evaluating Innovations. Implementing educational innovations will create new needs to assess student learning and faculty development. Projects should design and test new assessment and evaluation tools and processes. Projects that apply new and existing tools to conduct broad-based assessments or evaluations may also be considered, provided they span multiple institutions and are of general interest. Results obtained using these tools and processes should provide a foundation that leads to new questions for conducting research on teaching and learning.

• Conducting Research on Undergraduate STEM Teaching and Learning. Results from assessments of learning and teaching, and from projects emphasizing other components in the cyclic model, provide a foundation for developing new and revised models of how undergraduate students learn STEM concepts and for exploring how effective teaching strategies and curricula enhance that learning. Projects should have a practical focus; they should lead to testable new ideas for creating learning materials and teaching strategies that have the potential for a direct impact on STEM educational practices.

In all projects, testing to determine the effectiveness of the innovation should be appropriate to the stage of the project’s development and guide its further development and implementation. In addition, evaluation and assessment results from within one component should influence the design of other components. For example, results from faculty development efforts may lead to refinement of learning materials and teaching strategies, and results from projects implementing educational innovations may identify the need for new approaches for developing faculty expertise.

2. Project Types

The CCLI program is accepting proposals under this solicitation for three types of projects representing different phases of development. These phases reflect the number of components of the cyclic model included in the project (scope); the number of academic institutions, students and faculty members involved in the project (scale); and the maturity of the proposed educational innovation (state).

Phase 1 Projects – total budget up to $150,000 ($200,000 when four-year colleges and universities collaborate with two-year colleges) for 1 to 3 years.

Phase 1 projects typically will address one program component and involve a limited number of students and faculty members at one academic institution. Projects with a broader scope or larger scale can be proposed provided they can be done within the budget limitations. Proposed evaluation efforts should be informative, based on the project's specific expected outcomes, and consistent with the scope of a Phase 1 project. An extensive evaluation of student learning or use of an independent external evaluator may be included as appropriate but is not a requirement. In order to encourage collaboration between four-year colleges and universities and two-year colleges, projects involving such collaboration may request an additional $50,000. The distribution of effort and funds should reflect a genuine collaboration. Results from Phase 1 projects are expected to be significant enough to contribute to the undergraduate STEM education knowledge base.

Phase 2 Projects – total budget up to $500,000 for 2 to 4 years.

Phase 2 projects build on smaller-scale successful innovations or implementations, such as those produced by Phase 1 projects, and refine and test these on diverse users in several settings. In terms of scope, their focus ordinarily includes two or more components of the cyclic model with the connections between components explicitly addressed. Phase 2 projects carry the development to a state where the results are conclusive so that successful products and processes can be distributed widely or commercialized when appropriate. At a minimum, the innovation, if successful, should be institutionalized at the participating colleges and universities.

Phase 3 Projects – total budget up to $2,000,000 for 3 to 5 years.

Phase 3 projects combine established results and mature products from several components of the cyclic model. Such projects involve several diverse academic institutions, often bringing different kinds of expertise to the project. Evaluation activities are deep and broad, demonstrating the impact of the project’s innovations on many students and faculty at a wide range of academic institutions. Dissemination and outreach activities that have national impact are an especially important element of Phase 3 projects, as are the opportunities for faculty to learn how to best adapt project innovations to the needs of their students and academic institutions.

Connections Between Phases

Although it is expected that some Phase 1 projects will lead to Phase 2 projects and some Phase 2 projects to Phase 3 projects, there is no requirement that a proposal be based on CCLI-funded work; however the antecedent(s) for all projects should be cited and discussed. While it is unlikely that the program would be able to support a single multi-year project to address all components in depth at a large scale, a succession of grants might support such an effort. In all cases the funds requested should be consistent with the scope and scale of the project.

3. Important Project Features

Although projects may vary considerably in the number of components they address, in the number of academic institutions involved, in the number of faculty and students that participate, and in their stage of development, all promising projects should share certain characteristics.

• Quality, Relevance, and Impact: Projects should address a recognized need or opportunity in the discipline, clearly indicate how they will meet this need, and be innovative in their production and use of new materials, processes, and ideas, or in their implementation of tested ones. They should have the potential to produce exemplary materials, processes, and models, or important assessment and research findings. They should be based on an accurate and current understanding of the disciplinary field and utilize appropriate technology in student laboratories, classrooms and other learning environments. These projects, even those that involve a local implementation, should address issues that have the potential for broad application in undergraduate STEM education. The results of these projects should advance knowledge and understanding within the discipline and within STEM education in general.

• Student Focus: Projects should have a clear relation to student learning, with definite links between project activities and improvements in STEM learning. Moreover, they should involve approaches that are consistent with the nature of today’s students, reflect the students’ perspective and, when possible, solicit student input in the design of the project.

• Use of and Contribution to Knowledge about STEM Education: Projects should reflect high quality science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. They should have a rationale and use methods derived from existing knowledge concerning undergraduate STEM education and acknowledge existing projects of a similar nature. They also should have an effective approach for adding to this knowledge by disseminating their results.

• STEM Education Community-Building: Projects should include interactions between the investigators and others in the undergraduate STEM education community. As appropriate to the scope and scale of the project, these interactions may range from informal contacts with a few colleagues to the establishment of a formal body of scholars. These interactions should enable the project to benefit from the knowledge and experience of others in developing and evaluating the educational innovation. This collaborating network should involve investigators working on similar or related approaches in the proposer's discipline or in other STEM disciplines and may also include experts in evaluation, educational psychology or other related fields.

• Expected Measurable Outcomes: Projects should have goals and objectives that have been translated into a set of expected measurable outcomes that can be monitored using quantitative or qualitative approaches or both. These outcomes should be used to track progress, guide the project, and evaluate its ultimate success. Some of the expected measurable outcomes should pay particular attention to student learning, contributions to the knowledge base, and community building.

• Project Evaluation: Projects should have an evaluation plan that includes both a strategy for monitoring the project as it evolves to provide feedback to guide these efforts (formative evaluation) and a strategy for evaluating the effectiveness of the project in achieving its goals and for identifying positive and negative findings when the project is completed (summative evaluation). These efforts should be based on the project’s specific expected measurable outcomes defined in the proposal and should rely on an appropriate mix of qualitative and quantitative approaches in measuring the outcomes.

4. Program Evaluation

The Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) conducts an on-going program evaluation to determine how effectively the CCLI program is achieving its goal to stimulate, disseminate, and institutionalize innovative developments in STEM education through the production of knowledge and the improvement of practice. In particular, the program seeks to understand how effectively its projects are using current learning models in developing their innovations, contributing to the knowledge base on STEM education, and building a community of scholars in undergraduate STEM education. In addition to project-specific evaluations, all projects are expected to cooperate with this third party program evaluation and respond to all inquiries, including requests to participate in surveys, interviews and other approaches for collecting evaluation data.

Proposals are invited from all organizations and in any field eligible under the standard GPG guidelines. Specifically excluded are projects that address solely professional training in clinical fields such as medicine, nursing, and clinical psychology. There is no limit on the number of proposals an organization may submit. An individual may be the main Principal Investigator (PI) on only one proposal submitted for any deadline. There is no restriction on the number of proposals for which an individual may serve as a co-PI.

NSF anticipates having $31 million for all CCLI awards, pending the availability of funds. The awards will be made as standard or continuing grants. The number and size of awards will depend on the quality of the proposals received and the availability of funds. The expected number of awards, and duration and range of total NSF/DUE support over the lifetime of a CCLI project, including indirect costs, are as follows:

• Phase 1: Exploratory Projects – 55 to 70 awards expected, each with a total budget up to $150,000 ($200,000 when four-year colleges and universities collaborate with two-year colleges) for 1 to 3 years.
• Phase 2: Expansion Projects – 15 to 25 awards expected, each with a total budget up to $500,000 for 2 to 4 years.
• Phase 3: Comprehensive Projects – 1 to 4 awards expected, each with a total budget up to $2,000,000 for 3 to 5 years.

For collaborative projects, these limits apply to the total project budget.

Proposers may opt to submit proposals in response to this Program Solicitation via Grants.gov or via the NSF FastLane system.

• Full proposals submitted via FastLane:

Proposals submitted in response to this program announcement/solicitation should be prepared and submitted in accordance with the general guidelines contained in the NSF Grant Proposal Guide (GPG). The complete text of the GPG is available electronically on the NSF Website at: https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=gpg. Paper copies of the GPG may be obtained from the NSF Publications Clearinghouse, telephone (703) 292-7827 or by e-mail from pubs@nsf.gov. Proposers are reminded to identify this program announcement/solicitation number in the program announcement/solicitation block on the NSF Cover Sheet For Proposal to the National Science Foundation. Compliance with this requirement is critical to determining the relevant proposal processing guidelines. Failure to submit this information may delay processing.

• Full proposals submitted via Grants.gov:

Proposals submitted in response to this program solicitation via Grants.gov should be prepared and submitted in accordance with the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide: A Guide for the Preparation and Submission of NSF Applications via Grants.gov. The complete text of the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide is available on the Grants.gov website and on the NSF website at: https://www.nsf.gov/bfa/dias/policy/docs/grantsgovguide.pdf. To obtain copies of the Application Guide and Application Forms Package, click on the Apply tab on the Grants.gov site, then click on the Apply Step 1: Download a Grant Application Package and Application Instructions link and enter the funding opportunity number (the program solicitation number without the NSF prefix) and press the Download Package button. Paper copies of the Grants.gov Application Guide also may be obtained from the NSF Publications Clearinghouse, telephone (703) 292-7827 or by e-mail from pubs@nsf.gov.

The following information supplements the GPG and the NSF Grants.gov Application Guide:

• Proposers should make sure that their proposals respond to the list of questions provided both in the NSB general review criteria and in the additional program-specific review criteria in Section VI.A below. They should review the discussion of the components, phases, and important features in Section II above. Additional information on writing proposals can be found in "A Guide for Proposal Writing" (https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf04016).

• Principal Investigators are strongly encouraged to match their proposed budgets carefully to the scope and scale of a project. Excessive or poorly justified budgets indicate that the project is not well designed.

• For projects that plan to post material on the web, the proposal should include a sustainability plan for tagging these products with descriptive metadata (http://dublincore.org/ and http://metamanagement.comm.nsdlib.org/outline.html) to ensure they can be indexed and cataloged within the National Science Digital Library (http://nsdl.org).

• Proposers who intend to collect data from or about students, deans, professors, faculty, or other human subjects should comply with the section of the GPG on Proposals Involving Human and Animal Subjects (https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=gpg).

• While all material relevant to determining the quality of the proposed work must be included within the 15-page Project Description or as part of the budget justification, proposers may, as a part of the Supplemental Documentation, include letters showing collaborator commitments and organizational endorsement. In addition, for those projects whose deliverables include a final product, samples of these products (such as excerpts from book chapters, assessment tools, screen shots of software, sample teaching modules and other project deliverables) may be placed within the Supplementary Documentation section. These sample materials should be concise and relevant.

May 09, 2006
For Phase 1 proposals from submitting organizations located in states or territories beginning with A through M.

May 10, 2006
For Phase 1 proposals from submitting organizations located in states or territories beginning with N through W.

January 10, 2007
For Phase 2 and 3 proposals.

Proposers should allow sufficient time for all organizational approvals and for correction of errors in uploading the proposal in FastLane. No corrections to submitted proposals will be accepted after the deadline. Proposals received after the deadline will be returned without review. PROPOSALS THAT DO NOT MEET THE GPG REQUIREMENT FOR SEPARATELY AND EXPLICITLY ADDRESSING INTELLECTUAL MERIT AND BROADER IMPACTS IN THE PROJECT SUMMARY WILL BE RETURNED WITHOUT REVIEW. Proposals that do not comply with the formatting requirements (e.g., page limitation, font size, margin limits, and organizational structure) specified in the GPG will be returned without review.

There are two special CCLI reporting requirements. When CCLI PIs submit interim and final reports through FastLane, they will be asked to provide additional information for the Project Information Resource System (PIRS). In addition, PIs of CCLI grants will also be expected to cooperate with data collection associated with the CCLI program evaluation conducted by a third party organization supported by NSF.