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ShareFostering Faculty Engagement through Learning Analytics and Inquiry Communities
Wednesday
12:05 pm – 12:30 pm PT / 1:05 pm – 1:30 pm MT / 2:05 pm – 2:30 pm CT / 3:05 pm – 3:30 pm ET
Online
Amy Chan-Hilton, University of Southern Indiana
Shelly Blunt, University of Southern Indiana
Katherine Draughon, University of Southern Indiana
Bill Elliott, University of Southern Indiana
Zane Mitchell, University of Southern Indiana
The goals of this early capacity-building project are to strengthen the data infrastructure for faculty and cultivate faculty buy-in for engaging in STEM education transformation to improve student outcomes. The development and implementation of two integrated and multidisciplinary faculty communities, along with the initial observations of their impacts on the project goals, will be discussed. The Inquiry in STEM Success community seeks to enhance faculty members' understanding of student learning, success, and retention in STEM and increase knowledge of evidence-based instructional practices. The questions generated are used by the Data Tools Co-design community to iteratively refine data analytics tools. These activities aim to increase the collective understanding of faculty members in identifying bottlenecks and barriers to student success in STEM.
Three assumptions, grounded in theories of change, guide this project. First, providing faculty with multiple ways to engage with student success challenges and evidence-based teaching will cultivate motivation to consider change in the classroom. Second, data alone will not drive change, but rather developing connections with data and evidence will help motivate transformation. Third, systems thinking establishes an effective framework to organize efforts to implement change. The expectancy-value theory of motivation (Wigfield & Eccles, 2000) guides activities to provide faculty access to actionable data to inform teaching decisions (expectancy) and flexibility to make the information relevant (value). Faculty are collaborators in dashboard development, ensuring that the data provides actionable insights and answers meaningful questions. Communities of transformation/practice can be effective drivers to STEM education reform (Kezar & Gehrke, 2016; Shadle et al., 2017) and "significant conversations and significant networks" can influence faculty as they develop their understanding of teaching and learning (Roxå & Mårtensson, 2009). Moreover, data-based narratives engage individuals in sense-making while reflecting on their beliefs, expanding their understanding, and cultivating shared meaning (Peterson, 2017; Gandolfi, 2019).
Fostering Faculty Engagement through Learning Analytics and Inquiry Communities -- Discussion
Tessa Andrews
Jun, 2021
I am interested in what kinds of data faculty had access to and whether they type of data influenced their engagement. It's great that you've been able to leverage key principles from multiple change theories.
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Amy Chan-Hilton
Jun, 2021
Hi Tessa! Thanks for your comments.
Before the start of this capacity-building project (and currently), faculty have access to aggregate data about student demographics, student enrollment, and retention/ graduation rates. While the data can be filtered by demographics, college, and program/department, they are not at the course or section level. Additionally, the purpose of this available data is more reporting and retrospectives. In the conversations from the 2 faculty communities, the Questions and "I wonders" from faculty are focused on data that would help with course planning, identify students/groups who might benefit from additional focused support, and curricular planning (pre-requisites, content across courses). We're in the early stages of this project, and with the Data Co-Design faculty community working with our data offices and data analytics consultant, data dashboards and reports will be built for faculty.
As for influencing faculty engagement, the faculty communities have engaged a small group across departments, we expect that since the data tools will be developed with faculty involvement, who also can identify stories of their perspectives and engagement, that will help provide elements for broader faculty engagement.
We're also refining our theories of change for a future implementation project, in which faculty/groups will identify, plan, and implement their changes.
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Tessa Andrews
Jun, 2021
Thanks for these details Amy! So faculty were looking at data across multiple course? That intrigues me because I would have expected them to have more wonderings about data specific to their course/section. We've found that some faculty are quick to assume that any "problems" in the data, such as grade gaps between groups with different social identities, are not their responsibility. But that's a harder argument to make when the data are about your own course.
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Amy Chan-Hilton
Jun, 2021
Thanks for continuing the conversation, Tessa! We're in the stage of prioritization the generated Questions & Wonderments. From the faculty communities' conversations, we likely will be focusing on data from individual instructor's courses/sections rather than across multiple courses for data that is intended for planning (such as near the start of the semester). For data dashboards that are intended to provide trends and more longitudinal information for the purpose of reconsidering curriculum (pre-requisites, content, sequence), then aggregate data for a course with multiple sections (such as intro math and science courses) might be more appropriate.
I agree that there is a tendency of "not their responsibility" that you mentioned. Because of the somewhat self-selected group of faculty engaged in the communities, they are somewhat slower to those assumptions for some of the questions. It will be interesting when we start sharing the tools with the broader faculty. We agree - we hope that data about one own's course will help to prompt reflections in which the instructor can take ownership.
Another concern that has been raised by faculty is who gets to see this data and how it might be used by others. The project team also is being intentional to guide the conversations and questions from the perspective of the faculty member and not the students or other faculty to help mitigate stereotyping/bias. We're hoping that the stories about one's own perspectives and journeys will be helpful here.
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