|
|
 |
|
A ‘New Normal’ in
STEM Teaching?
By Colleen Flaherty
October 2, 2017
AAU wanted to improve science education beyond an
instructor-by-instructor basis. Five years on, a major initiative
piloted on eight campuses seems to be working.
Science instructors increasingly are moving beyond the lecture to more
innovative -- and effective -- teaching methods. But professors with a
taste for change often enact it alone, as their colleagues continue to
lecture.
The Association of American Universities wants to change that. In 2011,
it launched its Undergraduate STEM Initiative to encourage systemic
reforms to science education to improve teaching and learning,
especially in first- and second-year courses.
Early feedback was promising, and AAU is this week releasing a formal
five-year status report detailing progress at eight project sites:
Brown University; Michigan State University; the University of Arizona;
the University of California, Davis; the University of Colorado at
Boulder; the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; the
University of Pennsylvania and Washington University in St. Louis.
Mary Sue Coleman, president of AAU, wrote in the report that the
initiative is a “significant test of the degree to which a group of
prominent research universities can work collectively with their
national organization to improve the quality of teaching in
undergraduate STEM courses, especially large introductory and gateway
courses, thereby enhancing the learning experiences of many thousands
of their undergraduate students.” And so far, she said, results
“indicate a resoundingly affirmative answer to this test.”
Additionally, she said, the initiative has helped AAU understand how
it, as group of research universities, can better help to “support
meaningful change at various institutional levels to improve
undergraduate STEM education.”
Higher education is “now reaching a major tipping point,” Coleman
added. “We cannot condone poor teaching of introductory STEM courses
because we are trying to weed out the weaker students in the class or
simply because a professor, department and/or institution fails to
recognize and accept that there are, in fact, more effective ways to
teach.” Failing to adopt evidence-based teaching practices in the
classroom “must be viewed as irresponsible, an abrogation of fulfilling
our collective mission to ensure that all students who are interested
in learning and enrolled in a STEM course -- not just those who will
choose to major in or pursue an advanced degree in that discipline --
are provided with the maximum opportunity to succeed,” she said.
The report says that participation in the initiative beyond the eight
project sites has been high: all 62 AAU institutions now have a
designated STEM campus point of contact, for example. Some 55 member
institutions have participated in the initiative in some way, including
more than 450 faculty members and administrators. Departmentwide
innovations are becoming institutional priorities, teaching and
learning centers are being redesigned, and data and analytics are being
used to monitor and improve student learning.
Campuses are also exploring new hiring practices to advance
improvements in STEM education, learning spaces are being reimagined
and campuses are addressing the critical issue of meaningful
evaluations of faculty teaching, by AAU’s accounting.
Every project site reported some improvement in student learning
outcomes, according to the report. Degree of improvement varied, but
“dramatic reductions in achievement gaps especially for women,
underrepresented minorities and first-generation students” were
observed in some sites. Reports of decreased D’s, F’s and withdrawals
were common, as were increased persistence and success in subsequent
courses.
Project Sites at a Glance
Improved performance on exams sponsored by disciplinary societies was
observed, as was stronger performance on key disciplinary concepts, the
report says. And some sites that managed to track the effects of
instructional interventions on more general psychological factors
reported increased self-efficacy, metacognition and attitudes toward
science among students.
The initiative looks different on every campus but everywhere hinges on
evidence-based practices. Arizona, for example, has focused some of its
efforts to redesign classrooms into collaborative learning spaces:
there are currently 10 such spaces, ranging in size from 30 to 264
student seats (10 additional spaces are planned). AAU’s report quotes
Zoe Cohen, a professor of immunology at Arizona, as saying that she’s
been thinking about trying a “flipped” classroom and applied for one of
the new rooms. Once she started teaching in 2015, she said, it “changed
me as an educator.”
Cohen joined a faculty learning committee and an educational faculty
learning committee and learned and developed active learning
techniques. As a result, she said, she’s seen her students earn more
A’s and B’s and fewer D’s on the final exam for her physiology of the
immune system courses. Students also report more active and meaningful
engagement and understanding.
Cohen’s experiences match those of other Arizona professors teaching
different courses in other departments, including physics, chemistry,
molecular, cellular biology and engineering, according to AAU.
North Carolina, meanwhile, has taken a mentor-mentee approach,
embedding fixed-term faculty members skilled in teaching within
departments to train colleagues. Failures and D’s in redesigned courses
dropped from 11.5 percent in 2013 prior to the AAU project to 9.5
percent in 2016, while the learning gains in these courses were 13
percent higher than in traditional courses, the report says.
Departments have promoted training by giving faculty members course
releases to compensate for the course they are revamping that term.
Teaching assistants at Davis trained to use active learning practices
and adaptive learning technology were able to raise student outcomes in
introductory biology by half a letter grade. Washington University,
meanwhile, found that clicker-based active learning in high-enrollment
introductory science courses was positively associated with exam
performance. Boulder’s Departmental Action Teams worked toward
department-level consensus on learning goals, pedagogical approaches
and assessments aligned with learning goals. Results from the physics
department there indicate that students from all four courses had
post-test scores between 25 percent and 30 percent higher in reformed
courses.
Michigan State started with faculty discussions of core ideas in each
discipline, and the ways that knowledge is used, rather than changing
pedagogical approaches and assessments: the assumption was that
teaching changes would happen naturally when professors were thinking
about big ideas and scientific practices. Other changes include the
formation of an institute, CREATE for STEM, to coordinate science
education activities across campus, and they’ve had a large-scale
impact, according to AAU.
And at Penn -- which AAU says is the most faculty-centric of all
project institutions -- individual faculty members within six
departments are change agents, and their nexus is the Center for
Teaching and Learning. The center administers Penn's four-year-old
Structured Active In-class Learning (SAIL) program, which assists
instructors as they develop, adopt and evaluate active learning
activities to transform their classes. SAIL classes are designed to
allow students to struggle through the application of course content,
an often difficult part of the learning process, with the guidance of
instructors and help from peers, and require students to do work
outside class time to prepare for in-class activities, according to AAU.
Common Themes
Half of the project sites expanded their reach to departments not
originally included in their proposals. Graduate and undergraduate
assistants were called upon across campuses to help with the
initiative. “With more trained individuals in the room, the capacity to
facilitate and evaluate evidence-based pedagogy increases,” the report
says. “The experience also benefits the students themselves by
reinforcing core concepts and helping them to learn effective teaching
practices.”
Recurrent themes among institutions include a shift from individual to
collective responsibility by departments for introductory course
curriculum, hiring educational experts within departments to bolster
reforms, and a harnessing of (not just collecting) institutionwide data
to support student learning.
Institutions were also found to have reorganized administrative support
services to better support departmental reform efforts, such as by
connecting centers for teaching and learning with department-based
instructional efforts. Crucially, too, institutions found ways to
better manage the simultaneous pursuit of high-quality teaching and
research and signal the value of both. Washington University’s Center
for Integrative Research on Cognition, Learning and Education (CIRCLE),
for example, includes tenure-track faculty, in addition to permanent
research scientists. Consequently, according to AAU, the campus has
been able “to focus on curriculum and scaffolding rather than
individual course reforms as well as target sustainability and cultural
[reform].”
Over all, said Coleman, of AAU, while there is much work to be done to
realize “a ‘new normal’ -- one characterized by personal and
institutional expectations that all faculty members will both use and
be rewarded for using evidence-based approaches to instruction -- our
initiative suggests that progress is being made.”
|
|
|
|
