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Target AudienceBuilding on the BOSE Report of Indicators for STEM Education
Posted: Mar 23 2018 by
Target Audience: Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Supporting Students:Professional Preparation, Academic Support, Professional Development:Diversity/Inclusion
As everyone probably knows by now, the National Academies have released their Indicators for Monitoring Undergraduate STEM Education.
There clearly is much overlap with the charge to the Working Group on Demonstrating Change. We would appreciate informal discussion around two questions:- Is there anything left for us to do?
- Assuming the answer to #1 is "yes," how can we shape our work so as to build on this report? More
Implementing Integrated Comprehensive Student Programs in STEM: Challenges and Facilitators from the CSU STEM Collaboratives
Posted: Mar 21 2018 by
Target Audience: Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Supporting Students:Academic Support, Mentoring Program, Institutional Systems:Strategic Planning
In my last post, I described the benefits of integrated support programs for underrepresented students in STEM. These integrated programs bridge organizational silos and build a unified community of support, in which faculty and staff work together to break down barriers to student success. The campuses that participated in the CSU STEM Collaboratives project saw increased student success and other organizational benefits as a result of creating integrated programs.
While integration across functional areas represents a promising strategy for supporting student success, it represents a new way of working in higher education. Implementing integrated programs presents some unique challenges that may not be evident when implementing other types of interventions. In this post, I will briefly discuss a few of these challenges, as well as some strategies that STEM Collaboratives campuses used to overcome them. More
Integrating across Academic and Student Affairs to Support Underrepresented Students in STEM: Lessons from the CSU STEM Collaboratives
Posted: Feb 21 2018 by
Target Audience: Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Supporting Students:Academic Support, Mentoring Program
The challenges of keeping undergraduate students in STEM programs and getting them to complete their degrees are well-documented and frequently discussed by members of this group and a wide audience of stakeholders around the country (Eagan, Hurtado, Figueroa, & Hughes, 2014). For students from underrepresented backgrounds, these challenges are even steeper, as they may have experienced inadequate high school preparation in math and science, an unwelcoming or chilly climate in college, or poorly taught introductory STEM courses (Tsui, 2007). Many existing interventions for underrepresented students in STEM tend to target small groups and remain disconnected from other support programs for low-income, first-generation, or minority students. Additionally, most existing support programs have either not included or not coordinated with ongoing efforts to reform introductory STEM curriculum and teaching. More
Academic Advising: Leverage Point for Systemic Change Initiatives?
Posted: Nov 29 2017 by
Target Audience: Institution Administration, Non-tenure Track Faculty, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty, College/University Staff
Program Components: Supporting Students:Academic Support, Professional Development:Advising and Mentoring, Supporting Students:Professional Preparation
I am beginning my sixteenth year as an academic adviser; I have worked at large research universities, a small state college, and a small private college. My experiences and scholarly work have taught me that the day-to-day decisions academic advisers make can have a significant impact on how the university functions. Academic advising is structurally designed to include one on one conversations with students regarding the direction of their education, what their current challenges are, what they have learned, and what they want to learn in the future. As a result of this structure, advisers are uniquely positioned to have in-depth conversations about the university's mission, and why the curriculum is structured the way it is; this unique position can also allow advisers to function as a leverage point for change initiatives. More
What is systemic change?
Posted: Mar 9 2017 by
Target Audience: Institution Administration, Tenured/Tenure-track Faculty
Program Components: Supporting Students:Learning Communities
"Systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results that they are achieving right now."1 Higher education organizations are complex systems with many interacting subsystems. In order to create sustainable change, it is necessary to understand and align these subsystems. Subsystems include the faculty reward system, the higher education funding system that is based on student enrollment, the organization of universities into academic departments, the tradition of faculty autonomy over instruction, the metrics used to judge student performance (grades vs. learning), etc. Many change initiatives fail because they focus on only one subsystem without considering how this subsystem interacts with other subsystems. For example, in STEM it is common for education reformers to work to convince individual instructors about the benefits of active learning (that is, to change the instructor-student-instructional method subsystem). Research suggests that many instructors are receptive to this message and are interested in using more active learning strategies. More
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