Oral Presentations: Session B

One of the greatest challenges with implementing evidence-based reforms of STEM teaching is engaging research-focused tenure-track faculty. In many cases, these faculty need the right mix of incentives and mentoring to support adoption of student-centered pedagogies. For many faculty, it is an issue of identity and the perception that they may lose status as researchers by being perceived as too interested in teaching. The Student Success through Evidence-based Pedagogies (SSTEPs) Program was conceived to study this issue and develop interventions to help faculty adopt student-centered teaching approaches. At the center of this program are the SSTEP-Fellows. Teams of Fellows are chosen based on faculty-proposed, 2-year projects that seek to address departmental and programmatic needs. Fellows receive stipends, assistance by a STEM instructional designer, and support from a community of practice to plan, implement and revise their projects. Faculty develop assessment plans to gain skill in collecting and analyzing data on student learning and then become change agents within their departments to sustain and institutionalize the pedagogical changes. In addition to monitoring the specific reform projects through course observations (COPUS) and formative assessments (MAPs), campus-wide surveys follow the impact of the changes along several vectors including attitudes toward teaching, knowledge of evidence-based teaching methods, and an inventory of instructional practices used by faculty. Whereas some teams were highly successful, other projects led to more modest impacts on both faculty practices and departmental attitudes. We will compare the project teams and provide insights into the characteristics of those teams that were more likely to provide sustainable changes to both the faculty fellows and their respective departments.

Employers in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields report that recent graduates are deficient in important workplace skills (e.g., collaboration, professional writing). This has motivated widespread reform of STEM education to emphasize evidence-based, student-centered teaching approaches over teacher-centered approaches. This in turn has necessitated the development of new faculty programs for professional development in teaching and methods to accurately measure the impact of changing teaching practices. This study investigates the use of locally-derived student data to catalyze faculty member professional development. We developed and validated the Survey of Teaching Beliefs and Practices for Undergraduates (STEP-U) and used it to assess the extent to which students value specific workplace-related skills (e.g., scientific writing), as well as their experiences with teaching practices (e.g. writing assignments) thought to reinforce such skills. We collected data from undergraduate seniors (2012-2016; N=2405) in 10 STEM departments at a large research university. We also conducted 25 semi-structured interviews with students from the 5 largest majors. Our analyses showed that, while students in different STEM disciplines were in agreement on the value of some cross-disciplinary skills, for other skills there were significant disciplinary differences in values. Within some disciplines, differences in values were also associated with differences in demographic characteristics, student classroom experiences, and undergraduate research experience. Next, since departments play a pivotal role in change efforts, we attended departmental faculty meetings to survey faculty members regarding the extent to which they valued these same skills. At this time we also shared our findings from student surveys and discussed the implications of those findings for undergraduate instruction. This process has catalyzed collaborations among faculty members and Teaching and Learning Center staff, and has spawned a multi-institutional collaboration to study how locally derived data on student values and experiences can be used to inform faculty professional development.

It can be difficult for individuals within higher-education institutions to move their work in reformed, evidence-based instruction from the individual to an institutional-adoption level (Foote, Knaub, Henderson, Dancy, and Beichner, 2016). Institutional culture is created from a distinct collection of institutional and individual faculty values and goals, so the pathways institutions take to create sustainable instructional change differ. The literature on change has described cases that originate with faculty in their desire for improved learning based on student outcomes (Henderson 2005); from funding that focuses on systematically improving instructional practices in a department (Wieman, 2017); and from administrative priorities to focus on improving learning (Borrego and Henderson, 2014). At the University of Arizona, we are several years into a change process that began with individual faculty members in various STEM departments designing changes to teaching practices and curriculum (Offerdahl, Baldwin, Elfring, Vierling, and Ziegler, 2008; Talanquer and Pollard, 2010; Wallace, Prather, and Duncan, 2011). An AAU-STEM undergraduate education grant in 2014 helped to spread innovation to several additional departments and faculty learning communities developed through this project have now expanded beyond STEM disciplines. Increased discussion of and collaboration around teaching catalyzed a demand for more innovative teaching spaces, and the campus has developed strategies to renovate traditional spaces toward more collaborative spaces. Demand for these spaces has further increased awareness of evidence-based teaching methods and the need for structured teams of learning assistants to support student learning when evidence-based approaches are used in these spaces. We will discuss the interactions of factors on our campus that are contributing to a culture change around teaching and learning in the STEM disciplines and beyond.