Oral Presentations: Session E

The Science and Math Success Center at Sacramento State houses a number of peer support p performance and retention. The Success Center's three main programs, Peer-Assisted Learning (PAL), Science Educational Equity (SEE) and Commit to Study (C2S), focus on academic support, community and career support, and development of academic skills, respectively; all employ undergraduates, with a collective of more than 120 working to improve the success of their peers each semester. Outcomes include improved academic performance (a boost of ~15% for those participating in PAL), a closing or narrowing of the achievement/opportunity gap, improved retention, and advances aligned with enhanced self-efficacy. Peer leaders learn how to create inclusive learning environments, and participate in professional development trainings related to sense of belonging, promoting students' self-efficacy, employing a growth mindset, and refining their intercultural competency. The ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the peer leaders reflects the diversity of the students enrolled in STEM courses (over 60% URM, and more than 50% Pell-eligible), ensuring that programmatic interventions are truly "peer-driven", and providing an important, visible diversity in academic leadership. The Center's peer programs provide a rich opportunity for strengthening relationships between students of different backgrounds who are working together towards common academic goals. Each program has demonstrated significant, positive impact, and provided thousands of diverse students with learning opportunities outside of the regular classroom that will ultimately contribute to their overall success in STEM. The Center aims to promote institutional change by engaging peer leaders in collaborative partnership with faculty to more effectively identify and address the needs of our large and diverse population of students. In this session, details related to the creation, evolution, and ongoing support of the Success Center programs will be discussed, along with data related to program outcomes and overall analysis.

This presentation focuses on two new courses on race and gender in STEM at Brown University that were initiated by students. The first course on race and gender in the scientific community was run for a semester as a student-led independent study. It is now a regular course that examines disparities in representation in the scientific community, issues facing different groups in the sciences, and paths towards a more inclusive scientific environment through texts dealing with the history, philosophy, and sociology of science. The course also discusses specific problems faced by under- and well-represented racial and ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ community members. The course is limited to STEM students, who can integrate their STEM background with rigorous reading and their own personal experiences as STEM scientists. The course ends with a final projects where students can enact change. More recently, undergraduate neuroscience students wanted the opportunity to integrate their academic interests with their passions for living in a more equal world. Inspired by a brief discussion of implicit bias in a Neurobiology of Learning and Memory course, two students from that course, along with six others, expanded the idea into a full-semester course that contextualized racism from a neuroscience perspective and allowed for an understanding of the neurobiological mechanisms that play a role in discriminatory ideologies and behavior. The course culminated with a presentation to the broader community summarizing some of the key points they learned about and the insights they developed through their presentations and discussions during the semester. Additionally, the students evaluated all of their readings from the semester so that the best materials could be incorporated into future curricula in the neuroscience department. Some of their materials have been incorporated into a senior seminar in the Fall 2018 semester.

Change at the Core (C-Core) is a multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary, undergraduate STEM Education reform project at Western Washington University (WWU), Whatcom Community College (WCC), and Skagit Valley College (SVC). Over the past five years over 100 faculty, across all STEM disciplines have begun the transition form teacher-centered, information transfer models of learning to active, student-centered, inclusive models of learning. These changes are impacting faculty practices and attitudes, and altering the ways students engage in learning across a wide variety of STEM courses. The C-Core project has also led to revisions to introductory and major course sequences; changes in Review, Tenure, and Promotion processes; an increases in departmental/college conversations about teaching and learning; and greater understanding of and attention to equity, inclusion, and diversity issues. Changes are also being made/considered in strategic planning, hiring, and course evaluation documents, as well as requests for more flexible student-centered learning spaces. This session will focus on our model for change: the key decisions, processes, collaborations, we made, what worked and what didn't work, and how we recruited champions at the Institutional, College, and Department/Division levels to help us overcome barriers to change. We will also discuss the challenges of change including uneven uptake of active learning strategies by faculty and differential rates of change between departments. The session will end with our thoughts on next steps and institutionalizing the changes we have made.