Enhancing STEM Education at Oregon State University – Year 1

Koretsky, Milo; Bouwma-Gearhart, Jana; Brown, Shane; Dick, Thomas P.; Brubaker-Cole, Susie; Sitomer, Ann; Fisher, Kathleen Quardokus; Risien, Julie; Little, David; Smith, C. Veronica; Ivanovitch, John D.

doi:10.18260/p.24002

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The targeted courses for change were offered by seven STEM units: three science units (biology, chemistry, and physics), three engineering units (chemical engineering, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering), and mathematics. Students who were enrolled in courses that incorporated EBIPs were expected to develop well-connected conceptual knowledge structures and non-linear, iterative problem-solving abilities (Koretsky, Bouwma-Gearhart, Brown, Dick, Brubaker-Cole, & Sitomer, 2015). The change leaders consisted of faculty members from the STEM units, faculty from the college of education, members of the campus's STEM education research center, and institution administration (e.g., vice provost).…”

Section: Setting: Change Initiativementioning

confidence: 99%

Using social network analysis to develop relational expertise for an instructional change initiative

et al. 2019

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Background: Change leaders (faculty, administrators, and/or external stakeholders) need to develop relational expertise, recognizing the perspectives of others, to enable emergent, systemic change. We describe how change leaders of a grant-funded instructional change initiative developed relational expertise by analyzing faculty relationships and social subgroups to identify who was involved in discussions about teaching and learning and what specific topics were discussed. Results: Faculty discussions focused on daily classroom needs. Faculty who were in different departments or schools were mostly disconnected from each other, and faculty within these units often had subdivisions among them. Conclusions: Faculty lacked opportunities to discuss education, specifically, systems-level perspectives. The change leaders created organizational structures to catalyze communities, including an action research fellowship program, to support faculty in education discussions.

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Section: Setting: Change Initiativementioning

confidence: 99%

Using social network analysis to develop relational expertise for an instructional change initiative

et al. 2019

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“…The specific practices promoted by the change initiative leadership are interactive engagement with frequent formative feedback in lecture settings, and Cooperative Learning in laboratory settings. 1,10 Second, the change initiative leadership promotes these practices through the development of Communities of Practice to support teaching within and across units, and the enhancement of existing Communities of Practice. 1,11 These communities are intended to cross-pollinate ideas about the process of enacting evidence-based instructional practices and to support educators within the university who are engaged in evidence-based practice.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…1,10 Second, the change initiative leadership promotes these practices through the development of Communities of Practice to support teaching within and across units, and the enhancement of existing Communities of Practice. 1,11 These communities are intended to cross-pollinate ideas about the process of enacting evidence-based instructional practices and to support educators within the university who are engaged in evidence-based practice. Finally, the change initiative hopes to develop sustainable activities that will continue beyond the end of the change initiative's funding.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Finally, the change initiative hopes to develop sustainable activities that will continue beyond the end of the change initiative's funding. 1 In order to inform the specific strategies of change that can lead to these goals, this study is a preliminary investigation of the current state of the engineering departments.…”

Section: Contextmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This investigation has begun at the beginning of an institution-based change initiative developed to promote evidence-based instructional practices in large enrollment undergraduate STEM courses. 1 Three engineering departments, along with four other STEM disciplines, are involved in the change initiative. In order to develop change strategies, the context of the departments were explored through three levels of perspectives, individual, activity setting, and institutional.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Identifying Features of Engineering Academic Units that Influence Teaching and Learning Improvement

Fisher¹,

Smith²,

Sitomer³

et al.

2016 ASEE Annual Conference &Amp; Exposition Proceedings

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Dr. Kathleen Quardokus Fisher is a postdoctoral scholar at Oregon State University. She is currently participating in a project that supports the use of evidence-based instructional practices in undergraduate STEM courses through developing communities of practice. Her research interests focus on understanding how organizational change occurs in higher education with respect to teaching and learning in STEM courses. Christina Smith, Oregon State UniversityChristina Smith is a graduate student in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. She received her B.S. from the University of Utah in chemical engineering and is pursuing her Ph.D. also in chemical engineering with an emphasis on engineering education. Her research focuses on how the beliefs of graduate students around teaching and learning interact with and influence the environments in which they are asked to teach. Ann Sitomer, Oregon State UniversityAnn earned a PhD in mathematics education from Portland State University in 2014. Her dissertation examined the informal ways of reasoning about ratio, rate and proportion that adult returning students bring to an arithmetic review class and how these ways of thinking interacted with the curriculum. Other research interests include teachers' professional noticing of learners' mathematical thinking and organizational change. Ann works on both the implementation and research sides of the ESTEME@OSU project.Mr. John Ivanovitch, Oregon State University I am a third year doctoral student studying organizational change and science education at the collegiate level. My education includes a BA in cell and molecular Biology and a MSc. in integrated biochemistry/microbiology. Prior to entering the Doctoral program at Oregon State University I worked for over a decade as a biomedical researcher, with projects ranging from biochemistry to molecular virology. My current education research interests include transdisciplinary integration of STEM, and teaching-related cultures at the micro-, meso-and macro levels (i.e., discipline, departmental, institutional).Dr. Jana Bouwma-Gearhart, Oregon State University Jana L. Bouwma-Gearhart is an associate professor of STEM education at Oregon State University. Her research widely concerns improving education at research universities. Her earlier research explored enhancements to faculty motivation to improve undergraduate education. Her more recent research concerns organizational change towards postsecondary STEM education improvement at research universities, including the interactions of levers (people, organizations, policy, initiatives) of change and documenting the good, hard work required across disciplinary boundaries to achieve meaningful change in STEM education. Prof. Milo Koretsky, Oregon State UniversityMilo Koretsky is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC San Diego and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Chemical Engineering. He currently has rese...

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The role of pedagogical tools in active learning: a case for sense-making

et al. 2018

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BackgroundEvidence from the research literature indicates that both audience response systems (ARS) and guided inquiry worksheets (GIW) can lead to greater student engagement, learning, and equity in the STEM classroom. We compare the use of these two tools in large enrollment STEM courses delivered in different contexts, one in biology and one in engineering. Typically, the research literature contains studies that compare student performance for a group where the given active learning tool is used to a control group where it is not used. While such studies are valuable, they do not necessarily provide thick descriptions that allow instructors to understand how to effectively use the tool in their instructional practice. Investigations on the intended student thinking processes using these tools are largely missing. In the present article, we fill this gap by foregrounding the intended student thinking and sense-making processes of such active learning tools by comparing their enactment in two large-enrollment courses in different contexts.ResultsThe instructors studied utilized each of the active learning tools differently. In the biology course, ARS questions were used mainly to “check in” with students and assess if they were correctly interpreting and understanding worksheet questions. The engineering course presented ARS questions that afforded students the opportunity to apply learned concepts to new scenarios towards improving students’ conceptual understanding. In the biology course, the GIWs were primarily used in stand-alone activities, and most of the information necessary for students to answer the questions was contained within the worksheet in a context that aligned with a disciplinary model. In the engineering course, the instructor intended for students to reference their lecture notes and rely on their conceptual knowledge of fundamental principles from the previous ARS class session in order to successfully answer the GIW questions. However, while their specific implementation structures and practices differed, both instructors used these tools to build towards the same basic disciplinary thinking and sense-making processes of conceptual reasoning, quantitative reasoning, and metacognitive thinking.ConclusionsThis study led to four specific recommendations for post-secondary instructors seeking to integrate active learning tools into STEM courses.

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Enhancing STEM Education at Oregon State University – Year 1

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

Using social network analysis to develop relational expertise for an instructional change initiative

Using social network analysis to develop relational expertise for an instructional change initiative

Identifying Features of Engineering Academic Units that Influence Teaching and Learning Improvement

The role of pedagogical tools in active learning: a case for sense-making

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