Research experiences for school teachers and community college instructors in smart-vehicles: Initial implementation and assessment

We have successfully finished our summer program in our National Science Foundation (NSF) supported Research Experiences for Teachers (RET) Site entitled "Enriching the Professional Development of School Teachers & Community College Faculty in Rural Michigan - An RET Site on Smart Vehicles." The summer program was six weeks long and hosted five community college faculty, five in-service teachers (high school science) and five pre-service teachers (integrated science majors). Participants were split into five groups and teamed up with an engineering faculty and an engineering undergraduate student each. During their 40 hours/week work schedule, participants worked on faculty-supervised research projects for 25 hours/week and the remaining time was reserved for development of classroom unit plans. This paper presents details about the RET Site's management and discusses lessons learned from our experiences. Preliminary assessment results will be presented and discussed. Finally, we will conclude with the overall lessons we learned from this experience and discuss next summer's plans as a result of our analysis and self-reflections.