Presentations: Session XI

While research has demonstrated the benefits of active learning on student success and reduction of performance gaps for historically excluded groups, the majority of post-secondary STEM educators still rely heavily on passive lectures. This disconnect results from many factors, including lack of training and lack of institutional support and incentive structures for improving teaching. Pedagogical training addresses the first issue but, alone, cannot overcome institutional barriers to teaching reform. The Mobile Summer Institutes on Scientific Teaching (MoSI) is an institution-based iteration of the successful National Academies Summer Institutes (SI) intended to address both individual and institutional barriers to change. Since they were first piloted in 2014, the MoSIs have expanded to offer 74 MoSIs serving over 1800 current and future faculty at 38 host institutions across the US and internationally.
Adaption of the MoSI was guided by Henderson's 4 Categories of Change Strategies: 1) Disseminating Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2) Developing Reflective Teachers, 3) Developing Policy, and 4) Developing Shared Vision. The original SI focused on the first category while four new workshops were added to the MoSI to address the goals of the remaining three. Scholarly Teaching (development of course evaluation plans) and Peer Feedback and Reflection (training with two peer observation rubrics) workshops were added to promote development of reflective practices. A new Administrator workshop fosters awareness and buy-in for policy-level support of participant efforts while a new Strategic Planning workshop facilitates development of a shared vision for change. During Strategic Planning, participants identify aspects that would make a campus ideal for student learning, then determine where their campus falls short of the ideal. They develop Strategic Plans to address one or more of the shortcomings. We will share lessons learned from the Strategic Planning Sessions and a new metric to evaluate institutional change since participation in the MoSI.  

 Where equity and inclusion are concerned, STEM higher education remains in need of systemic reform and transformational change—within and across institutions. In this presentation, we discuss how promoting institutional transformation at scale may require revising STEM higher education's "knowledge infrastructures," the term used by scholars in the field of science, technology, and society (STS) studies to denote the varied social and technical elements (e.g., tools, policies) on which the production and sharing of knowledge depends. Specifically, sustainable institutional change may require the development of new interinstitutional collaborations, which facilitate collective work across and beyond institutions. Yet without careful design, the development of large-scale collaborations may introduce unexpected challenges or magnify existing inequities that clash with justice-oriented goals.

We highlight three areas where design decisions in any interinstitutional collaboration can sponsor or subvert equity- and inclusion-oriented goals: people, voice, and data. We illustrate each area with design lessons and questions drawn from the Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses (SEISMIC) project, an interinstitutional collaboration that brings together 10 research-intensive public universities. First, in terms of people, we consider design decisions related to collaboration and membership, paying particular attention to how increasing collaboration scale may clash with, rather than contribute to, collaboration diversity. Second, in terms of voice, we discuss design decisions related to member power, participation, and communication, highlighting the implications such choices can have for whose perspectives are centered (or silenced). Third, in terms of data, we examine how efforts to pool data across sites may help to make interinstitutional patterns newly visible—but may also risk rendering local contexts, meanings, and complexities invisible. Ultimately, through this SEISMIC case study, we identify some general guiding questions, focused on infrastructural design tensions, on which educators and change agents can draw when developing their own collaborations.

Centers are key institutional resources. In their mid-level support roles, centers lead and facilitate transformative campus efforts that enhance organizational learning and performance. Our research has explored the roles played by STEM Education Centers and Centers for Teaching and Learning with an emphasis in STEM education. This session will showcase a set of self-evaluation tools that are currently under development to assist centers in their mission to improve undergraduate STEM education. These tools arise from data gathered from a purposive sample of national institutions and a national survey. Through cross-case analysis four primary construct areas were identified: Centralization, Use of data, Translation, and Network. Each construct represents a mid-level support role that strengthens a center's ability to respond to institutional needs, and leads to improved outcomes in undergraduate STEM education. Centers can apply these self-evaluation tools to establish a benchmark assessment and to identify new goals in undergraduate STEM education. Because the tools capture current national trends, they are valuable for centers who wish to effectively position themselves and expand in this area.
This research represents research area 1 of the Network of STEM Education Centers, NSEC initiative. As such, it seeks to support centers by offering a set of tools through which they can show progress and direction. This establishes center value beyond reputation and image, characteristics often used to measure performance in higher education. During this session we will review some example aspects of these evaluation tools and discuss the ways in which they may be used by the community. Center leaders, institutional leaders, administrators, and center stakeholders seeking to position a center within an institution will find these tools of interest.