Anatomy of STEM teaching in North American universities

Abstract

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.

Why a grassroots Summer Institutes model failed: Exploring obstacles to evidence‐based teaching awareness in low‐awareness, low‐support contexts

“…In recent years, greater attention has been paid to understanding EBT implementation barriers. In the United States, this interest was largely precipitated by observations that most STEM courses continue to be taught using LBT despite significant increases in the number of EBT‐trained faculty . This disconnect between awareness and enactment prompted several investigations into the challenges associated with EBT reform.…”

“…[1][2][3] Through lectures, instructors transmit information to students verbally and visually, usually in a unidirectional manner, relegating students to becoming passive observers. 3 Historically, it is believed lectures preceded the pervasiveness of books as a way to disseminate knowledge to large audiences. 1 Over the centuries, this approach has been passed down as an institutional legacy with new instructors learning to teach through an "apprenticeship of observation" by witnessing peers and seniors.…”

“…In the United States, this interest was largely precipitated by observations that most STEM courses continue to be taught using LBT despite significant increases in the number of EBT-trained faculty. 3,32 This disconnect between awareness and enactment prompted several investigations into the challenges associated with EBT reform. Work by Bathgate et al, 30 for example, described EBT implementation as a bidirectional process: with barriers impeding and supports encouraging.…”

A forum where french‐speaking faculty can exchange research on teaching

“…To that end, our strategy has been to involve academics from diverse backgrounds and at different levels, so that communication can also take place, for example, between instructors or educational specialists and the main deciders (such as department chairs or university presidents). As the general community begins to realize, strategies for massive dissemination of instructional change are not necessarily effective [29,30]. Besides the critical role of educational specialists, we believe that propagation of research-based instructional practices and sustainable change best occur when combining bottom-up and topdown approaches.…”

Longitudinal study of persistence in professional development outcomes of early career biology faculty

“…RTOP is a teaching observation tool designed to assess teaching reform through use of learnercentered practices (Sawada et al 2002). The tool suggests using at least two observations per participant, although recent work suggests that at least four observations are necessary for a reliable characterization of teaching (Stains et al 2018). For this study, there were two observations per course each year for each participant, resulting in a maximum of six observations per participant over the course of the study.…”