By Michael GsovskiThe Daily Northwestern
Usually, the most people get over the holiday break is a $50 gift card to Target or a half- decent sweater.
Northwestern, on the other hand, did a lot better.
Over the past month, NU announced that the university and professors received two grants totalling $4 million.
A grant of $3 million, announced by Northwestern Dec. 5, will finance a research initiative led by Brian Reiser, a SESP professor of learning sciences, and University of Michigan educational researcher Joseph Krajik. Awarded Sept. 15 by the National Science Foundation, the grant is intended to develop and test a science curriculum for upper elementary and middle school students.
The curriculum will focus on developing scientific thinking skills rather than simply memorizing collections of facts.
“Rather than an aspect of science content like how plants get food or how force or motion works in physics, they were interested in learning progressions that had to do with the practice of science, planning and conducting scientific investigations, reasoning with scientific models and so on,” Reiser said.
Work already has begun on the initiative. Some of it borrows from Reiser’s previous project, which also sought to make middle school science education more involved. Since last fall, the work has centered on creating a curriculum that will later be tested in the classroom.
Reiser is already cautiously optimistic about the initiative’s classroom possibilities.
“I think in the next three and a half years we can learn about what’s a good sequence to teach about scientific models, how teachers can best support them and what sort of activities in classrooms we can put together to teach those ideas,” Reiser said. “It’s a separate problem to get those things into a lot of classrooms.”
The other grant, for $1 million, was announced Jan. 2 by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Trust, which launched its charitable operations in December 2006. It will help expand the Kellogg Graduate School of Management’s work in derivatives, which are financial instruments based on the price of underlying assets such as stocks, bonds or currencies.
“Most financial transactions include some derivatives, from consumer mortgages, which have a prepayment option, to the structure of large mergers and acquisitions,” said Janice Eberly, professor of finance and head of the finance department at Kellogg. “Derivatives are part of the vocabulary of modern finance, and no finance or management professional can function without that knowledge in today’s markets.”
The finance department already has plans for the grant’s windfall. It will support a new doctoral program in derivatives pricing and will offer a new curriculum in many derivatives courses. The money will also support several research projects on derivatives conducted by faculty and graduate students.
Kellogg also will give part of the money to the newly formed Asset Management Practicum, where students will manage a portion of the business school’s endowment.
“(The grant will) increase the size of the portfolio and it will allow us to consider more strategies than we would have otherwise,” said Prof. Robert Korajczyk, the program’s leader. “We can think about how to add derivative overlays on top of the equity strategies.”
NU received $24.6 million in grants in 2004, making it the leading recipient of grant dollars in Illinois.
Reach Michael Gsovski at [email protected].
