What advice about the use of measurement would you give to a department chair?

Posted: Jun 9 2017 by

Pamela Brown
CUNY New York City College of Technology

Pamela Brown

I was invited to participate in the Accelerating Systematic Change Network (ASCN) Workshop, held at the HHMI in the summer of 2016 and have since continued collaborating with Working Group 4, with the goal of shedding light on using data to drive change – identifying, explicating and disseminating sources of information. I have served as the Associate Provost at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, a minority serving, public, urban college, for the last 5 years, after having served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences for 6 years. Following are my responses to the guiding questions forwarded by the working group's leadership. More

Featured Case Studies at the 2017 SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion

Posted: Apr 17 2017 by

Inese Berzina-Pitcher
Western Michigan University

Inese Berzina-Pitcher

Creating an Institutional Culture of Accountability to Ensure Diversity and Inclusion in STEM Fields

Dr. Christine A. Stanley, Vice President and Associate Provost; Professor, Higher Education Administration, Texas A&M University will be the opening speaker on TAMU's Diversity Plan. TAMU's Diversity Plan, which was developed in 2010 and is executed by the Office for Diversity, established the expectation that all academic and administrative units submit annual reports to monitor and evaluate progress toward accountability, climate, and equity efforts. More

When it comes to teaching, is there a universal law that you cannot save time or use it differently?

Posted: Apr 4 2017 by

Judith Ramaley
Portland State University

Lorne Whitehead
University of British Columbia

Judith Ramaley and Lorne Whitehead

This blog post is about teaching, and time, a topic that we briefly discussed during one of our ASCN Working Group 2 meetings.

We begin with time. Throughout history, people have pondered it in many ways. One way is to study the quantities of time required for specific tasks in order to find ways to improve overall results. This can be helpful because time is a limited resource that is best spent wisely. For example, when this approach is applied to manufacturing, it can yield significant benefits for companies and their customers. In situations like this, efforts to save time and improve efficiency make sense. Not all situations have that character. In a second category of situations, most people don't find it appropriate to quantify and optimize time and results. Consider, for example, social interactions. We can't really measure them, and even if we could, who would want to? Many seek social interactions but very few wish to measure them or be so measured. More

2017 SMTI-ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion

Posted: Mar 20 2017 by

Inese Berzina-Pitcher
Western Michigan University

Inese Berzina-Pitcher

June 24–25, 2017
Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Louisiana

Start time: 3:00 pm CT, June 24
End time: 5:30 pm CT, June 25

Registration is closed.

This summer, in partnership with the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) ( This site may be offline. ) , we are organizing the 2017 SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion . The APLU Science and Mathematics Teaching Imperative (SMTI) is a community of faculty, department chairs, deans, and provosts who are engaged in improving STEM teaching and teacher preparation. This workshop immediately follows the NSEC 2017 National Conference .

The goal of the 2017 SMTI/ASCN Workshop on Diversity and Inclusion is to advance a dialog on diversity and inclusion in undergraduate STEM education between practitioners transforming institutions and researchers who are studying systemic change at higher education institutions. More

What is systemic change?

Posted: Mar 9 2017 by

Charles Henderson
Western Michigan University

Charles Henderson

"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