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The chief goal of WIDER is to transform institutions of higher education into supportive environments for STEM faculty members to substantially increase their use of evidence-based teaching and learning practices. These practices should serve to increase persistence in STEM and contribute to the goal of producing 1 million additional STEM graduates. In particular, WIDER seeks this this transformation for high enrollment, lower division courses required for many STEM majors and taken by many other students to fulfill general education distribution requirements.

Broadly defined, effective STEM teaching and learning are not only instructional practices in traditional learning environments, but also modern laboratory methods and field research, proven distance education methods (or hybrid designs incorporating both face-to-face and distance methods), and improved approaches to motivating student interest in STEM. In all cases, the primary goal of wider is to increase substantially the scale of these improvements within and across the higher education sector in order to accomplish the following:

1. Improved student learning;
2. Increased numbers of students choosing STEM majors, particularly from demographic groups underrepresented in STEM;
3. Improved retention in the first two years of undergraduate study and to graduation of all STEM majors.

WIDER grants may be used to 1) begin institutional planning efforts; 2) support implementation efforts for evidence-based teaching and learning practices and; 3) for research on how to increase the importance placed on evidence-based practices in institutional strategic planning and faculty rewards.

An estimated 30-50 awards will be made for standard or continuing grants in 4 tracks:

1. Planning grants (up to 20 awards)
2. Institutional implementation grants (up to 12 awards)
3. Community implementation grants (up to 12 awards)
4. Research grants (up to 10 awards)

Limitations on Proposals per Organization: An organization may submit only one Planning or one Institutional Implementation proposal for a given deadline. There are no restrictions on the number of Community Implementation or Research proposals that an individual or organization may submit.

Faculty interested in submitting a Planning or Institutional Implementation proposal should submit a 1 page project summary, including the project’s intellectual merit and broader impacts, to David Bond at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it by May 10, 2013.