Oral Presentations: Session I

One of the main goals of UCLA's Center for Education Innovation and Learning in the Sciences is to broaden student success in STEM. Working with institutional research folks, we identified the persistence rates in science and math majors; more than half of students from underrepresented groups (URGs), who declared a science or math major, did not end up completing a degree in science or math. Only one quarter of students from URGs who declare a physical sciences major end up completing such a major. Data revealed that this was less due to advising and course navigation, and much more due to experiences in the STEM gateway courses.
We were able to leverage an array of of grants, departmental leaders, educational interventions, and assessment data over the past five years to now have all of UCLA's STEM gateway series undergoing some form of transformation. Although some more resistant faculty remain, more than half of all STEM gateway course sections now have at least some level of transformation to evidence-based teaching practices.
Each course series had a different pathway to transformation, with different barriers and opportunities, so we analyze here the various common elements and ultimately create a flow chart depicting when and how each intervention was most effective. We also describe the extent to which these interventions aligned with the eight change strategies (Borrego & Henderson. J. Eng. Educ. 103, 2014) based on the four quadrants of change (Henderson, Beach & Finkelstein. J. Res. Sci. Teach. 48, 2011), and (2) the STEM persistence framework (Graham et al. Science 341, 2013).
The common elements across almost all transformations were as follows: a strong dean; persistence data; supportive department leaders; incentive to improve coordination of the the series; "embedded agents" of pedagogy experts in the department; and a goal of assessing transformation.
The various successful interventions (almost none of which were present in every transformation) were postdoctoral teacher-scholars, co-teaching models, a course revision committee, faculty learning communities, multi-day workshops of professional development, and undergraduate learning assistants.

Transforming the culture of the third largest institution of higher education in the State of Washington is no small task; especially when that goal is to bring transformative learning including High Impact Practices (Kuh 2012) to scale across all disciplines. Difficult as this may be, there are compelling reason to undertake this as undergraduates who engaged in these experiences were markedly more likely than their peers to feel that they were engaged and thriving in the workplace after graduation (Gallup Purdue 2014). At Bellevue College, we do this by using the dual operating system framework – bringing together the adaptive operating system and the command control operating system (Sharp 2018)At Bellevue College, we developed the RISE Learning Institute (Research, Innovation, Service, and Experiential Learning) - by combining disparate programs such as our Center for Career Connections and the undergraduate research program, adding other high impact practices such as service and cohort-based learning (including our innovative Autism Spectrum Navigators program), we harness synergies and take transformative learning to the institutional scale. We partner with employers, non-profits, and 4-year universities to bring students experiential learning opportunities and develop faculty capacity. We collaborate with other units on campus to strengthen the adaptive operating system and work with the command and control system to create an environment for sustainable change. We are empowering and energizing our faculty, creating broad opportunities for underserved students, and changing the culture of our institution. In this session, we will share the story of the RISE Learning Institute, its collaboration with other units on campus and provide attendees an opportunity to think about possible transformations on their own campuses. Kuh, G. (2008). High-Impact Educational Practices: What They Are, Who Has Access to Them, and Why They Matter. Washington, DC: Assn of Amer Colleges. https://news.gallup.com/poll/168848/life-college-matters-life-college.aspx (accessed 11/11/18)https://jimritchiedunham.wordpress.com/tag/leith-sharp/ (accessed 11/11/18)