Educational transformation in upper-division physics: The Science Education Initiative model, outcomes, and lessons learned

Abstract

[This paper is part of the Focused Collection on Upper Division Physics Courses.] In response to the need for a scalable, institutionally supported model of educational change, the Science Education Initiative (SEI) was created as an experiment in transforming course materials and faculty practices at two institutions -University of Colorado Boulder (CU) and University of British Columbia. We find that this departmentally focused model of change, which includes an explicit focus on course transformation as supported by a discipline-based postdoctoral education specialist, was generally effective in impacting courses and faculty across the institution. In CU's Department of Physics, the SEI effort focused primarily on upper-division courses, creating high-quality course materials, approaches, and assessments, and demonstrating an impact on student learning. We argue that the SEI implementation in the CU Physics Department, as compared to that in other departments, achieved more extensive impacts on specific course materials, and high-quality assessments, due to guidance by the physics education research group-but with more limited impact on the departmental faculty as a whole. We review the process and progress of the SEI Physics at CU and reflect on lessons learned in the CU Physics Department in particular. These results are useful in considering both institutional and faculty-led models of change and course transformation. I. NEED FOR A MODEL OF CHANGEThere is a rising tide of attention to the improvement of undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) teaching. This attention is driven by the increasing emphasis on science and technology as the current and future driver of national economic growth and the results of discipline-based education research (DBER), which is indicating clear opportunities for improvement. We see evidence of this increased attention in numerous calls for action from disciplinary societies, national networks, and federal agencies [1][2][3][4][5][6].However, as long as the impetus, success, and preservation of change relies on single individuals, rather than organizational structures that support that change, teaching innovations will be inherently fragile, and scaling up those efforts will be challenging. Previous research has demonstrated the high rate of loss of both the number and fidelity of use of instructional innovations [7,8]. A focus on individual decision making and creation of instructional materials is also inherently inefficient due to duplication of effort, as faculty continually reinvent the wheel. A new model for change is needed that guides coherent collective efforts by making innovative, effective teaching an institutional goal that is embedded in the established organizational structures. Such a model would allow this rising tide of attention to STEM education to lift our collective boats towards a higher goal, rather than leaving STEM faculty paddling around on their own in an attempt to keep their heads above water.As a field, scholars ...

Fostering sustainable improvements in science education: An analysis through four frames

“…Data sources related to the SEI used in our analysis include literature published on the SEI (Chasteen et al, 2015), public SEI departmental reports, and personal interactions with Runes faculty and core SEI project members.…”

“…We make use of these categories in our analysis below, and we add a "negligible" category to describe impacts that were non-zero but T A B L E 1 A summary of the roles of the five Runes faculty members that we focus on in this paper, in terms of their faculty ranks and their participation in the SEI, DAT, and ACEs which did not count as "modest." To enable the reader to refer to prior work published by the SEI, we note that Runes was referred to by them as "Department D" (Chasteen et al, 2015).…”

Alternative model for administration and analysis of research-based assessments

“…RBAs provide a standard and valid measure of student outcomes that can be compared across semesters, instructors, institutions, and pedagogies. Such measures help to quantify the relative success of educational strategies, and thus can have significant impact on the initial adoption and continued use of new innovations by individual instructors, as well as at the programmatic level [4][5][6]. Additional discussion of the importance and value of assessment, including the use of RBAs, can be found in Refs.…”

Development and uses of upper-division conceptual assessments

“…The development of these instruments was motivated, in part, by a need for a research-based and validated measure of the success of our course transformation efforts [6,10,13,20] with respect to learning goals developed for each course. These learning goals were developed in conjunction with a broad cross section of CU physics faculty as part of the Science Education Initiative's model for course transformation [21]. The goals represent a consensus of what these faculty want students to be able to do after completing our upper-division courses [20].…”

“…Indeed, one of the primary motivators for the development of our instruments was a need to assess the effectiveness of our upper-division course transformation efforts relative to other instructional practices [21].…”