Developing Stem Educational Grant Proposals: Best Practices

Many programs at the National Science Foundation (NSF), and other funding agencies, have a goal of the improvement of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education. Funding opportunities exist for laboratory development and curricula reform in support of improvement in student learning and STEM educational pedagogy. Understanding all facets of the grant proposal process, from inception through proposal review and, ideally, to grant awarding is critical in the development of nationally competitive grant proposals. With many components required for a successful grant proposal, it is important for a potential grantee to develop a set of best practices when undertaking grant proposal writing efforts. The author of this paper has written a successful NSF Adaptation and Implementation grant proposal [1] entitled “An Integrated Internet-Accessible Embedded Systems Laboratory” and a successful NSF Department Level Reform grant proposal [2] entitled “Developing a Modern Computer Engineering Curriculum Focusing on Embedded Systems.” The goal of this paper is to suggest best practices for proposals for people considering writing similar grant proposals. Considerations include properly addressing program solicitation requirements, proposal organization, proposal readability, and related issues.