Effective Practices in Undergraduate STEM Education Part 1: Examining the Evidence

Since the publication of reports in the late 1990s by the National Science Foundation (NSF; 1996) , the National Research Council (NRC; 1996 , 1999) , and the Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University (1998) on the importance of improving undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), at least 13 other federal civilian departments and agencies have spent billions of dollars on more than 200 programs to realize this goal. Most of that spending has come from the NSF and the National Institutes of Health (Government Accounting Office, 2005 ). Many private foundations also have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education. For example, since 1988 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has awarded more than $1.5 billion in grants to improve science education at the precollege and college levels.1 As a result of this financial support and commitment from the public and private sectors, research into and implementation of numerous and varied promising practices for teaching, learning, assessment, and institutional organization of undergraduate STEM education have been developed in recent years. These promising practices range from improvements in teaching in individual classrooms to changes in departments.2 They include increased prominence of campus and national centers for teaching excellence, professional development for faculty members (e.g., National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology,3 On the Cutting Edge: Professional Development for Geoscience Faculty4, First II5), and large outreach and dissemination efforts (e.g., Project Kaleidoscope,6 SENCER7). Virtually all of the new promising practices have focused on student-centered, inquiry-based approaches to teaching (summarized in Handelsman et al., 2007 ) or alternative assessments of student learning (e.g., see references in Deeds and Callen, 2006 ), compared with more traditional approaches to teaching that emphasize lecturing and multiple-choice or short-answer examinations. Some of these new approaches, such as Peer-Led Team Learning8 and Just in Time Teaching,9 have gained national recognition and prominence. Over the past decade, new practices have been implemented in vastly different grain sizes. Some have been targeted at specific classrooms, whereas others have focused on restructuring entire curricula. Still others have emphasized the role of assessment and evaluation of learning to improve teaching effectiveness (e.g., NRC, 2003a ,b ). Moreover, virtually all of these practices were developed independently from one another and have emphasized somewhat different goals. In addition, communications across the STEM disciplines and within their subdisciplines is often lacking. Thus, despite many years of effort and significant financial expenditure, surprisingly little is known about the collective impact of these approaches on the academic success of individuals and of different populations of students. For example, do more students who experience these new approaches to learning become sufficiently interested in these subject areas to want to take additional STEM courses compared with students from more traditional courses? Do these students succeed in higher-level STEM courses? Do they retain more information over longer periods and understand concepts more deeply? Are they better able to apply what they have learned in one context to others? At the institutional and professional levels, are faculty willing to change their teaching when presented with evidence that certain approaches to teaching are more effective than others? Data from valid and reliable assessment instruments, such as concept inventories (Hestenes et al., 1992 ; Mazur, 1997 ; Hake, 1998 ; Krause, 2004 10; Garvin-Doxas et al., 2007 ; Garvin-Doxas and Klymkowsky, 2008 ; Klymkowsky and Garvin-Doxas, 2008 ; Smith et al., 2008 ; also see http://gci.lite.msu.edu), often show that students do not understand concepts deeply; when faculty are presented with such data, are they actively reassessing their own approaches to undergraduate teaching? At the national level, how effective are these promising practices in changing the institutional culture of higher education toward acceptance and adoption of new approaches to undergraduate teaching, student learning, assessment of learning, and the balance of professional responsibilities of STEM faculty and within STEM departments? Given significant institutional differences in approaches and intended audiences, is enough evidence emerging to indicate that certain approaches to undergraduate teaching and learning “transcend” these differences? Can these approaches be adopted to engage the broad spectrum of undergraduate student audiences in the kinds of learning that will be required to address the large, complex problems that must be addressed in the twenty-first century?