Q&A: Courtney Heppner

Growing up, Courtney Heppner’s mother was a school teacher, which helped inspire Heppner's interest in education at a young age. Heppner joined the Battelle Center for Mathematics and Science Education Policy as program manager in 2008 and she was recently appointed Associate Director for STEM Projects at the Battelle Center for Science and Technology Policy at The Ohio State University. Recently, STEMscape met with Courtney to speak about her current projects.

What are some of the key projects you’re working on?
There are actually three areas we’re focusing on in our STEM education research. The first is about the important role of networks in STEM innovation. Public-private networks are common features of the STEM improvement landscape and often appear to have significant influence on the launch and sustainment of initiatives. The Battelle Center believes it’s important to understand how the structure and processes of such networks affect the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness of reform initiatives and to illuminate which policy, management and leadership practices are conducive to robust and effective networks.

We’re currently collaborating with researchers at the Center for Elementary and Mathematics and Science Education at the University of Chicago on a project funded by the National Science Foundation. The project title is “The Ohio STEM Learning Network: A Study of Factors Affecting Implementation, Spread and Sustainability” and grows out of previous work by the Battelle Center and CEMSE aimed at understanding the mechanisms of innovation in STEM education.

What’s the status of this study?
It’s currently in the second of three years, and we’re seeking to answer several questions:
(1) What is the status of implementation of each platform school's STEM school model (including innovative management and STEM teaching and learning practices) and to what extent does the model reflect the design principles of OSLN’s platform school initiative?
(2) What factors have contributed to or inhibited the implementation of each platform school's STEM school model?
(3) What factors have contributed to or inhibited the spread of each platform school's STEM school model to other schools, hubs and institutions over time?
(4)  What are the differential effects of the factors affecting sustainability, spread and implementation on the evolution of the implementation (within and across
sites) over time?

What’s the second project the Battelle Center is tackling?    
It’s about modeling. Whether modeling the K-12 educational system or the medical/health sciences workforce, the Battelle Center believes the act of modeling (system dynamics, agent-based modeling or otherwise) helps researchers and policymakers understand the interplay between individual choices, institutional policies and larger social and demographic factors.

We’re currently in the second year of a four-year National Institutes of Health study titled “Developing a Scientific Workforce Analysis and Modeling Framework.” The study looks at developing a model to evaluate labor market transitions of Ph.D. graduates into the bio-medical sciences.

What’s the desired outcome for the modeling initiative?
We want to get answers to four key questions, namely:

(1) What is the pipeline for research labor?
(2) What life course factors/processes influence Ph.D.-to-worker trajectories?
(3) What are the key transitions/bottlenecks?
(4) What impacts do particular “policies” have on long-term outcomes?

What’s the focus of the Center’s third STEM project?
The final project is on visual analytics. Though the world of education policy sometimes seems awash in data, practitioners in the field are very often starving for information and have few tools that offer both analytical and communicative power. The Battelle Center believes that data visualizations and visual analytics embedded in large bodies of data and can accelerate comprehension among different stakeholder groups. 

Do you have any partners in this project?
The Battelle Center is currently collaborating with the Delaware Valley Industrial Research Center, the 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education and the Ben Franklin Technology Partners of Southeastern Pennsylvania to visualize the STEM assets in the greater Philadelphia region. We’re doing this by using Starlight ™, a visual analytics information system that dramatically accelerates and improves the understanding of large quantities of disparate information. We’re now in the second phase of this work, looking to use the power of Starlight™ on other STEM asset databases across the country.

What’s the most important thing about STEM that you think people need to understand?
As with anything, definitions matter. Before we can have a conversation with someone about STEM education or STEM schools, we need to develop a common vocabulary around what STEM is and what a STEM school is.

What do you think is the biggest myth/fallacy among the general public about STEM?
To many, “STEM” simply stands for science, technology, engineering and math.  However, go to any of the OSLN schools and you will see that STEM is much more than the sum of four subjects. In these schools, STEM is also a way of thinking and doing.

What do you think can be done to correct this misconception?
I think the NSF project that we are working on, in collaboration with CEMSE, is a great start. One of the first tasks of the project was to define what a STEM school is by having the OSLN platform schools identify their essential elements or critical components. Lots of people throw around the “STEM school” label, but these schools are unique and vary widely in their structure, supports and interactions.

Nonetheless, STEM schools do seem to share some common characteristics, which you can readily see in this terrific infographic that CEMSE developed.

What has most impressed you since joining the STEM movement at Ohio State in 2008?
The schools have definitely impressed me the most. I have visited many of the OSLN platform schools in Ohio, and I really wish I that I had had a school like that where I grew up. They are pretty amazing places.