Student Success Through Evidence-based Pedagogies

Student Success Through Evidence-based Pedagogies (SSTEP) is a project aimed at helping STEM faculty implement evidence-based teaching practices in undergraduate courses at an urban research university. The goals were:

1. support faculty team-initiated two-year course development projects
2. collect data on faculty teaching attitudes and practices
3. develop an undergraduate STEM Learning Assistant program to support evidence-based practices in large lectures
4. support training of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs)
5. engage local community colleges. We framed our project on the four quadrants of the institutional change model of Henderson, Beach, and Finkelstein (2010).

We found that most of the elements of our project spanned more than one quadrant.

Including a two-year pilot, we are in the eighth year of the project and are focusing on sustainability and institutionalization. We transitioned from large-budget faculty fellows projects, to a faculty learning community model with more modest costs, and a larger focus on community building and peer observations. For the undergraduate STEM Learning Assistant program we developed more diverse funding, and stability through a pedagogy course that offers service-learning credit instead of pay. The curriculum is also being used for new GTA training in the Physics and Astronomy Department. Our community of staff and faculty that focused on GTA training shared resources, helped update university GTA training, and supported each other as we transitioned to remote and hybrid lab classes. Finally, progress in engaging the local community colleges has been limited but successful. It demonstrated the efficacy of reaching out in areas where we have local capacity and a tight curricular connection with the community college. Indirect institutional outcomes included development of a STEM Commons in association with the STEM LA program, and close work with an expansion the Office for Teaching and Learning that occurred during this project.