Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Education and Human Resources | Apply Online

Opportunity Summary:

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR) program is a large, competitive grant opportunity focused on strengthening undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The premise behind the program is that the nation needs more STEM graduates and better-prepared STEM professionals, including future STEM teachers, to support long-term economic strength, public health, and innovation. NSF frames undergraduate education as the key lever for meeting those needs, both by preparing students to thrive in fast-changing and emerging fields and by helping build a broadly scientifically literate public. In practice, the program is aimed at improving what students experience in undergraduate STEM learning environments and ensuring that effective instructional and curricular approaches are grounded in evidence and contribute back to the evidence base.

A central theme of IUSE: EHR is investing in approaches that are evidence based (using what research already shows works) and evidence generating (producing new knowledge about how STEM students learn and what kinds of teaching and institutional practices improve outcomes). The solicitation emphasizes the full pipeline from understanding STEM learning, to designing and testing new instructional strategies and curricular models, to studying how those changes perform in real settings, and then scaling up and sharing best practices so they can be adopted more widely. Alongside improvements in learning outcomes, NSF highlights broadening participation as a core goal, meaning proposals are expected to consider how to increase both the number and diversity of students who succeed in STEM fields and how institutions can reduce persistent barriers that limit participation.

The program invites proposals that tackle immediate, practical challenges in undergraduate STEM education while also encouraging forward-looking work that anticipates new structures and functions in higher education. Examples of these emerging directions include organizational changes within institutions, new forms of certification or credentialing, rethinking how courses are designed and sequenced, and expanded use of cyberlearning and other technology-enabled learning models. Importantly, IUSE: EHR recognizes that STEM disciplines have distinct cultures, content demands, and teaching challenges, and it encourages collaborations that connect disciplinary faculty with education researchers and social and learning science scholars. The intent is not only to improve classrooms and curricula, but also to deepen the field’s understanding of effective STEM teaching and learning.

IUSE: EHR is organized into two main tracks, each addressing STEM education improvement at a different level. The Engaged Student Learning track centers on teaching, learning, and direct educational experiences that influence student engagement and achievement. Projects in this track typically focus on course-level or program-level innovations, new pedagogies, instructional materials, learning environments, or research-informed strategies that measurably improve student learning and persistence. The Institutional and Community Transformation track focuses on broader change, such as department, institution, or multi-institution reforms; policies and practices that shape STEM education at scale; and community-level efforts that support adoption and sustained use of effective approaches. This track is generally suited for work that changes systems, incentives, culture, or cross-institutional coordination so that improvements endure beyond a single course or a small pilot.

Within each track, proposals fall into two tiers that reflect maturity and readiness. Exploration and Design projects support earlier-stage work where teams investigate needs, develop and refine ideas, build partnerships, design interventions, and generate preliminary evidence. Development and Implementation projects support more advanced efforts where interventions or reforms are ready for broader deployment, rigorous study, and evaluation in authentic educational settings, often with an emphasis on implementation quality, measurable outcomes, and potential for scalability. Together, these tracks and tiers let applicants propose anything from carefully designed early exploration to large-scale implementation, as long as the work is grounded in evidence, contributes to knowledge, and is positioned to improve undergraduate STEM outcomes.

Administratively, this is a discretionary NSF grant program (Funding Opportunity Number 15-585) under CFDA 47.076 (Education and Human Resources). It does not require cost sharing or matching. The estimated total funding amount listed is $110,000,000, with individual award sizes ranging from a $300,000 floor to a $3,000,000 ceiling. Eligibility is described as unrestricted, meaning it is broadly open to many entity types, subject to any specific clarifications in the full solicitation. The opportunity was originally posted June 27, 2015, with a closing date of November 3, 2015, and it was later archived February 10, 2017. NSF also notes that IUSE: EHR aligns with the broader NSF-wide IUSE initiative, signaling that the program is part of a coordinated agency effort to improve undergraduate STEM education nationally and to support projects that both demonstrate impact and advance generalizable knowledge about what works.

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