Characteristics of well-propagated teaching innovations in undergraduate STEM

Abstract

Background: The undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community has developed a large number of innovative teaching strategies and materials, but the majority of these go unused by instructors. To help understand how to improve adoption of evidence-based education innovations, this study focuses on innovations that have become widely used in college-level STEM instruction. Innovations were identified via a questionnaire emailed to experts in STEM instruction. Descriptions of identified innovations were validated by preparing brief descriptions of each innovation and sending them to the original developers, when applicable, for feedback, and searching relevant literature. Publicly available funding data was collected for each innovation. STEM disciplines surveyed include biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, geoscience, mathematics, and physics. Results: The 43 innovations identified were categorized based on two criteria: level of specificity (general, recognizable, branded) and type of change (pedagogical, content, both, neither). The 21 branded innovations were analyzed in more detail. The majority (14/21) require relatively modest changes in pedagogy and no changes in content. In addition, nearly all have received at least 3 million dollars in external funding over at least 10 years. Conclusions: This paper presents the full list of instructional innovations produced, which can be used by educational innovation developers to understand how their ideas fit within the broader landscape and to identify innovations in one discipline that may have promise for transfer. The findings regarding funding of the branded innovations have important implications for both educational innovation developers and funding agencies. In particular, the study indicates that a long-term mindset and access to long-term funding are vital for broad adoption of new teaching innovations.

The Elementary teacher readiness toward STEM-Based contextual learning in 21st Century Era

“…The greater STEM approach opportunities in helping students to solve real world problems by applying concepts from various disciplines as well as critical thinking skills, collaboration, and creativity (Burrows & Slater, 2015). There have been many integration of STEM with learning in the classroom conducted by researchers (Khatri et al, 2017). Such as the implementaton of STEM in Biology in high school (Saptarani, Widodo, & Purwianingsih, 2019), in learning chemistry (Sudarmin et al, 2019), and in various laboratory and learning activities (Blotnicky, Franzodendaal, French, & Joy, 2018;Burrows & Slater, 2015;Porter, 2018;Shin, Rachmatullah, & Roshayanti, 2018).…”

Specific features of psychological readiness for innovative activity (with the main focus on young adults in St. Petersburg and Tomsk)

“…43]. При наличии большого числа педагогических инноваций одни из них работают, а другие нет [4]. С нашей точки зрения, для разработки успешной системы образования необходим комплексный подход, учитывающий атрибуты инновационной среды 7 [8; 9] и инновационного потенциала субъектов деятельности 8 [10; 11].…”

“…Одними из первых комплексный подход к изучению инновационной деятельности в России предложили исследователи Томской школы психологии, определив психологическую готовность к инновационной деятельности как специфический уровень самореализации, который обусловлен актуальными возможностями человека и «особым типом системных образований ценностно-смыслового порядка, определяющими характер и форму 4 для диагностики инновационных диспозиций личности, входящих в систему параметров психологической системы деятельности, был использован опросник стилей реагирования на изменения, разработанный Т. Ю. Базаровым и М. П. Сычевой [17; 18]; опросник состоит из 52 пунктов, оцениваемых попарно и интерпретируется по шкалам «Консервативный стиль», «Инновационный стиль», «Реактивный стиль» и «Реализующий стиль».…”

PhysPort as professional development to foster creativity in teaching

“…Instructor professional development in physics teaching often is framed as a linear path: instructors should move towards more extensive and sustained use of research-based teaching methods [1][2][3] (which are often branded with a specific name; [4]), either with fidelity or adaptation [5][6][7][8][9][10]. Physics education researchers also often advocate for instructors to assess learning in their courses with concept inventories [2,11,12].…”