Promoting adoption of research-based strategies: Understanding the impact of malleable factors on instructional practices in undergraduate STEM courses

The inclusion of active learning pedagogies repeatedly demonstrates favorable and enhanced student outcomes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. Despite calls for the adoption of these strategies by educational and governmental bodies, lecture-based practices remain prominent. Many factors (i.e., barriers and motivators) for the adoption of active learning have been reported in the literature. However, these findings are largely from qualitative studies containing small sample sizes and thus lack the statistical power to quantitatively understand the association of these factors, when collectively considered, with the uptake of active learning. The Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform model provides a framework to situate these factors related to active learning; malleable factors (i.e., factors that can be changed or altered) are grouped into three categories: contextual factors (i.e., physical and temporal contexts of teaching), personal factors (i.e., extent of instructors' preparation and teaching-related professional development), and teacher thinking factors (i.e., instructors' beliefs about teaching and learning). We leverage large-scale survey data from introductory chemistry, mathematics, and physics instructors along with multilevel modeling techniques to gain insight into the association of seventeen malleable factors with percent time lecturing and stage of research-based instructional strategy (RBIS) adoption based on the CACAO model of change (e.g., awareness, tryout, and adoption). Regression analyses indicate that several contextual, personal, and teacher thinking factors are associated with these outcomes (i.e., percent time lecturing and stage of RBIS adoption). Based on these findings, we provide recommendations on how change agents can tailor and personalize professional development opportunities for STEM instructors and how institutional leaders can incentivize the uptake of active learning in undergraduate STEM courses.