Miller Faculty Fellowships

School of Education Part of Three Miller Faculty Fellowships

AMES, Iowa – Several projects were awarded 2026-27 Miller Faculty Fellowships, with three project teams comprised of faculty from the School of Education in the College of Health and Human Sciences. These are innovative, teaching-based research projects that will impact student-centric instruction.

Developing peer mentor and mentee networks for learning and career readiness

Research team: Rachel A. Smith, School of Education (CHHS); Jen Leptien and Kyle Holtman, learning communities (Div. of Student Affairs); and Thaddeus Hill, residence (Div. of Student Affairs)

Amount awarded: $37,691

More than 600 undergraduate peer mentors are embedded in learning community courses across campus. The peer mentor role is designed to help new students transition to the institution, acclimate to their field of study and become successful college students. Implicit in this process is that peer mentors will deploy their campus interpersonal and engagement networks to help their mentees build their own campus support networks. As part of this mentoring process, the peer mentors themselves will learn and build career-readiness skills. The project proposes implementing an innovative network-based reflective activity and assessment tool to help learning community peer mentors and their mentees reflect on the construction of their campus support networks and their networks’ resources and opportunities. The reflection also will serve as an assessment tool to help learning community administrators, coordinators and faculty better understand how to strengthen student network formation and peer mentor training, supervision and career-readiness skills.

Enhancing spatial reasoning and digital self-efficacy through learner-generated 360-degree virtual reality STEM modules

Research team: Yungjeong (Leah) Mo, civil, construction, and environmental engineering (ENGR); E.J. Bahng, School of Education (CHHS); and Michael Lyons, biomedical sciences (VET)

Amount awarded: $50,000

This interdisciplinary project enhances undergraduate learning by integrating student-designed 360-degree virtual reality (VR) modules into science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) and non-STEM courses across three colleges, spanning construction engineering, biomedical sciences and education. Students will design immersive VR learning modules using 360-degree images, enabling active exploration of complex, spatially rich concepts that are difficult to convey through traditional instruction. Students will be content creators, strengthening discipline-specific content knowledge and spatial reasoning as they select meaningful viewpoints, annotate immersive scenes and construct coherent VR narratives. By capturing, ethically editing and assembling 360-degree visual data, students also will develop digital literacy and technological self-efficacy. Cycles of design, peer feedback and revision further promote active learning, reflective decision-making and instructional confidence. Reusable tutorials, workflows and prototype modules developed through this project will support scalable implementation across courses and sustained use beyond the project period.

Supporting AI pedagogies in pre-service STEAM teacher preparation

Research team: Jeanne Dyches, School of Education (CHHS); Sara Nelson, aerospace engineering (ENGR); Brandon Sams, English, (LAS); Ben Van Dusen, School of Education (CHHS); Aaron Maurer, Iowa Department of Education; and Rachel Shannon, NASA/electrical and computer engineering (ENGR)

Amount awarded: $39,378

Since 2010, U.S. national standards have required secondary students (grades 6-12) to develop disciplinary literacies: the ability to read, write and think within a particular disciplinary context. Given the rapidly increasing ubiquity of AI, secondary teachers must develop new pedagogical skills to meet the needs of their students. In this project, four cohorts of science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) pre-service secondary teacher — future math, science, English language arts and social studies educators — engage in a six-week AI unit to learn about AI; collaborate with K-12, university and NASA AI instructional technology experts; draft, teach and refine their own AI disciplinary micro-lesson; and employ ISU resources such as the Student Innovation Center’s Digital Media Studio and makerspaces to develop and open educational resource text showcasing the AI-driven micro-lessons. The project highlights ISU’s innovative approach to teacher preparation, aids in recruitment and advances the university’s land-grant ideals.

The Miller faculty fellowships are named for F. Wendell Miller, a Rockwell City attorney whose estate created the Miller Endowment Trust, with income from the trust divided evenly between Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Miller was born in Illinois, and grew up in Rockwell City. An alum of Grinnell College and Harvard Law School, he practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family’s farm holdings. He died in 1995 at age 97. At Iowa State, the annual earnings support faculty development proposals, graduate scholarships and other academic initiatives. The faculty fellowship program is administered by the president’s office and the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching.