Presentations: Session H

A scientifically literate citizenry is essential to meet the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals and ensure that the U.S. remains economically competitive in an increasingly resource-constrained society. Yet neither STEM literacy nor a larger and stronger STEM workforce are sufficient to address the wicked problems of sustainability. It requires reshaping the way we educate future leaders across STEM as well as business to understand the intersections of disciplines to address socio-scientific problems. But developing truly transdisciplinary curricula that can develop requisite knowledge and skills and commitments needed to address wicked problems like sustainability is difficult. Until now, universities have had limited success in educating students even at the intersection of STEM disciplines, much less including disciplines from business or social sciences in curriculum development and instruction on this topic.

We present a model for faculty members' co-development of transdisciplinary curriculum, rooted in the wicked problem of sustainability. Business and Science: Integrated Curriculum for Sustainability (BASICS) is an NSF-funded partnership among faculty at Bentley University, Northern Illinois University, Wittenberg University, and the Science Education Resource Center (SERC). The project has produced two transdisciplinary curriculum modules that can be used in a range of courses. The modules, which are comprised of a collaboratively designed "common exercise," and course-specific exercises to provide disciplinary context, are freely available for use on the BASICS website (https://serc.carleton.edu/basics/).

The modules were developed and tested by teams of faculty in two overlapping two-year development cycles, with faculty gathering in "local learning communities" (LLCs) within and among the institutions. Assessment results demonstrate the modules are successful in building student knowledge and skills around sustainability. Equally important, the BASICS project develops faculty understanding, skills and practices, and commitment to transdisciplinary curriculum development and teaching, promising as one means to transformation higher education to better meet the needs of students and society.

From its early origins in social psychology (Lewin 1946), organization development theory and practice has sequentially focused on capacity building (Senge 1990) and whole-system managed change (Dannemiller & Jacobs 1992). We suggest that the more recent generative change model grounded in dialogic practice (Bushe & Marshak 2009) might be particularly well suited to the issue of improving undergraduate STEM education in the complex university context.

Project SEA Change (DUE 1525623) used emergent strategies to host a series of containers for generative conversations by faculty and administrators in a variety of formats and time scales that followed open space principles of flexibility and voluntary self-selection of participants. We complemented this work with a range of diagnostic measures in pre-/post format, and report here on the extent to which intervening to reframe language can change mindsets (Aragón et al. 2018), and ultimately behavior.

Over the course of SEA Change student quantitative literacy improved by 22%, faculty social networks increased in density and highlighted the value of connectors. RBIS surveys revealed two significant changes in faculty thinking compared to baseline; firstly, in the belief that students would react negatively, and secondly in acceptance of the evidence for efficacy of RBIS, but without detectable changes in classroom pedagogies, suggesting that the primary driver of change is to be found elsewhere. Faculty interviews surfaced modifications of epistemological beliefs (Nespor 1987) as a result of conversations as the most likely cause.

Devising containers for discourse is inexpensive. However, effective implementation requires faculty practiced in the art of hosting, role flexibility, use of self, and selective suspension of the diagnostic mindset. Our results suggest that although the latter two may be challenging for many STEM faculty, methodologies at the interface of diagnostic and dialogic approaches offer significant opportunity to reframe the narrative and improve undergraduate STEM education.

Since the assault on the US Capitol there is no longer any question that US democracy is in crisis. Racial, economic, social, and political divisions are growing. Media manipulation, gerrymandering, voter suppression, and strategic court rulings have allowed an explicitly anti-democratic minority to disproportionately influence public discourse, law and policy, a situation accelerated by a lack of public understanding of basic elements of American governance. A common diagnosis is that chronic underinvestment in civic education, attributed to an overemphasis on STEM, has worsened this situation and the Higher Education community has responded with analyses, and prescriptions to increase the undergraduate curriculum devoted to civic education.

This presentation will provide a brief overview of these initiatives and challenge to two key assumptions that organize the changes being proposed:
1. That improving civic education requires a "zero-sum" re-balancing of resources from the STEM, which is increasingly dominating majors, curriculum, funding, and academic resources, to the traditional vehicles of "civic education,"--history, government, political science. There is no question that the unflagging boosterism for STEM as the economically prudent choice of study underlies the freefall in humanities and social science enrollments, but does that mean that support for STEM is at the expense of civic learning, as so many articles and commenter have argued? Can science learning be an equally powerful context for civic education?
2. While educating for democracy, and not just workforce needs, will require curricular change, it will also require recovery of values, insights and practices offered by educational visionaries and "scientific democrats, of the past, including John Dewey, Jane Addams, W.E.B DuBois, who, when faced with democratic crises more severe than we face today, looked to scientific inquiry as the vehicle for building civic understanding and democratic capacity.

Quantitative Reasoning (QR) is gaining in popularity across the United States as a gateway postsecondary mathematics course. In particular, enrollment in QR at public institutions of higher (IHEs) in Ohio increased from 251 students in 2016–2017 to 6,923 students in 2020–2021. Moreover, QR addresses topics in quantitative literacy that have been linked to aspects of human flourishings, such as health and financial well-being (Peters, 2020). These QR topics include (a) proportional reasoning, (b) probability, including conditional probability, (c) statistical thinking, and (d) mathematical modeling. We wish to discover whether and to what extent QR students are making measurable pre–post gains in these four content areas while enrolled in QR. In this talk, we will report on the development and pilot testing of a multiple-choice QR assessment instrument. Initially, we wrote 96 items, distributed equally across both the four listed content areas and three sets of QR core competencies: (i) interpretation and representation, (ii) calculation, and (iii) reasoning and analysis. We confirmed the content validity by inviting QR instructors from multiple Ohio IHEs to check the content and wording of the items. We refined the items based on this feedback. Then, we pilot-tested the 96 revised items with QR students at a limited number of Ohio IHEs. Using the resulting data, we conducted item analysis and factor analysis on the instrument, and measured the reliability of the instrument and its conent and competency subscales. We will share our results and plans for further refinement of the instrument and its use as a postest–posttest assessment for QR courses in Ohio. We will also share the prospects and plans for extending this QR assessment development and implementation across a wider collection of Ohio's IHEs and the possibility of extending this work to a national level.