National and local initiatives focused on the transformation of STEM teaching in higher education have multiplied over the last decade. These initiatives often focus on measuring change in instructional practices, but it is difficult to monitor such change without a national picture of STEM educational practices, especially as characterized by common observational instruments. We characterized a snapshot of this landscape by conducting the first large scale observation-based study. We found that lecturing was prominent throughout the undergraduate STEM curriculum, even in classrooms with infrastructure designed to support active learning, indicating that further work is required to reform STEM education. Additionally, we established that STEM faculty’s instructional practices can vary substantially within a course, invalidating the commonly-used teaching evaluations based on a one-time observation.

Adequately accommodating students who are blind or low-vision (BLV) in the sciences has been a focus of recent inquiry, but much of the research to date has addressed broad accommodations rather than devising and testing specific teaching strategies that respond to the unique challenges of BLV students learning chemistry. This case study seeks to identify instructional techniques that support or impede the representation of information for BLV students in the context of a typical gas laws unit in a college chemistry course for science majors. Desimone's framework on selection and attention informed the analysis. A blind student participated in five interviews to provide insights on how symbols, equations, and concepts were communicated and interpreted. Findings identified in the analysis of transcripts pertain to three communication modalities of interest: verbal, written, and tactile representations of information to aid learning. Using the results generated for practitioners, the authors generated guidelines for faculty, teaching assistants, and university administrators to improve the teaching and learning chemistry for BLV students.

In 2012, the National Research Council and the American Chemical Society criticized many graduate education programs in the chemical sciences for not adequately preparing graduate students for the interdisciplinary careers that they will likely occupy. These and other reports anecdotally suggest that soft skills, broad versus specific knowledge, and interdisciplinary skills will make graduate students more competitive and better prepared for careers. However, relatively few efforts have been made to empirically evaluate and assess what specific knowledge and skills doctoral chemists require to be successful in their future careers. The qualitative study here expands on the previous anecdotal data by empirically identifying the knowledge and skills required for chemistry careers and compares those required in the academic and nonacademic sectors. A total of 31 U.S.-trained doctoral chemists from academia, industry, and government were interviewed about the activities they conduct on a day-to-day basis and the knowledge and skills required to successfully complete these activities. Twelve distinct, nonduplicative knowledge and skills that enable these chemists to successfully perform their jobs in different chemical sectors have been identified by thematic analysis of the interviews. Three inter-rater reliability (IRR) metrics were used to evaluate coding and demonstrate the trustworthiness of data. The results provide evidence that technical knowledge, communication, management, and several other skills are required for chemists in both academic and nonacademic job sectors, but these skills could be fundamentally different across sectors. The results of this study imply that different skill sets are required for diverse career pathways, and graduate programs should consider tailoring their programs for students accordingly.

In this era of instructional transformation of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses at the postsecondary level in the United States, the focus has been on educating science faculty about evidence-based instructional practices, i.e. practices that have been empirically proven to enhance student learning outcomes. The literature on professional development at the secondary level has demonstrated a tight interconnectedness between ones’ beliefs about teaching and learning and one's instructional practices and the need to attend to faculty's beliefs when engaging them in instructional change processes. Although discipline-based education researchers have made great strides in characterizing instructional practices of STEM faculty, much less attention has been given to understanding the beliefs of STEM about teaching and learning. Knowledge of instructors’ thinking can inform faculty professional development initiatives that encourage faculty to reflect on the beliefs that drive their classroom practices. Therefore, this study characterized the interplay between beliefs and instructional practices of nineteen assistant chemistry professors. Luft and Roehrig's Teaching Beliefs Interview protocol was used to capture beliefs; classroom observations and course artifacts were collected to capture practices. Clear trends were identified between faculty's beliefs (characterized through constant-comparative analysis and cluster analysis) and practices (characterized with Blumberg's Learner-Centered Teaching Rubric). Overall, beliefs of most of the participants were somewhat aligned with their instructional practices, with the exception of one cluster of faculty who held student-centered beliefs, but received only moderate scores on the Learner-Centered Teaching Rubric.