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The Presidential Council of Advisors on Science and Technology released its report on undergraduate STEM education recently. The report, Engage to Excel: Producing One Million Additional College Graduates with Degrees In STEM, focuses on five key recommendations the Council believes are critical for transforming undergraduate STEM education:
1. Catalyze widespread adoption of empirically validated teaching practices.
2. Advocate and provide support for replacing standard laboratory courses with discovery-based research courses.
3. Launch a national experiment in postsecondary mathematics education to address the math preparation gap.
4. Encourage partnerships among stakeholders to diversity pathways to STEM careers.
5. Create a Presidential Council on STEM Education with leadership from the academic and business communities to provide strategic leadership for transformative and sustainable change in STEM undergraduate education.
Since 1989, PKAL has been a leader in advocating for widespread adoption of “what works” in undergraduate STEM education, which includes empirically validated teaching practices and discovery-based courses. Through its program of national meetings, projects, and networks, a community of nearly 7,000 STEM educators and leaders has been built. Many of these PKAL leaders have been on the cutting edge of reforms such as studio labs and Just-In-Time Teaching (for more on these, go here). At PKAL Regional Network meetings around the nation, participants learn firsthand how to implement these teaching practices. Network meetings are organized by PKAL leaders who have been cultivated over the years as part of the Faculty for the 21st Century program. Over 600 faculty members are engaged in ongoing and regular professional development with colleagues from across the STEM disciplines and spectrum of institutional types. Two networks are forming in Chicago and the Washington, DC areas as well.
I applaud the report’s recommendations and am particularly glad to see the emphasis on the first two years of college and special attention given to mathematics education. Underpreparation in mathematics is one of the biggest barriers to STEM student success, in particular for students who come from under-resourced high school environments. Remedial math rates at some universities are greater than 50%! While mathematical skills are critical for most STEM majors, they are also important for all students to become quantitatively literate; that is, able to analyze data and draw conclusions from it. These skills are paramount for creating a citizenry that can aptly grapple with real world issues, such as climate change, and make informed decisions regarding personal actions as well as government policies. Many colleges and universities have quantitative reasoning learning outcomes for all students, but more should focus on this requisite skill for 21st century living. The beauty of focusing on quantitative literacy is that it requires a curriculum that engages students in real world problem solving—an example of the type of “empirically validated teaching practices” featured in the PCAST report. For more on QL, check out the resources at the National Numeracy Network (NNN) , one of PKAL’s partner organizations.
The growth in college STEM graduates called for MUST come primarily from minority populations. By percentage, African American and Latino students are significantly less likely to graduate than their white counterparts (see report on STEM from the Center for Education and the Workforce or National Academies Expanding Minority Participation in science and technology report). Because most of these students begin their university careers in community colleges, it means that community colleges are pivotal levers for future STEM education improvement. For community college students to be prepared to successfully matriculate into and graduate with baccalaureate degrees in STEM, we must work harder to create transfer pathways that are aligned not only across the curriculum but across advising, disciplinary cultures, and social support systems. The Ramping Up for STEM Success project that PKAL and AAC&U are leading is working to design such programs. We are hopeful that this pilot will produce new and more effective models, such as this one led by the Maricopa Community College District in Arizona, as well as forge a national movement of community colleges and university partnerships that are working together to improve STEM transfer student success.
In my view, an additional recommendation needs to be added to this report, and that is to build both institutional and individual capacity to lead transformation efforts. Change doesn’t happen spontaneously. It is led by visionaries with the skills to move a community toward a common goal. These visionaries can be informal or formal leaders. Regardless, they must have the acumen and expertise to understand how to identify key issues, build coalitions, navigate the murky waters of campus politics, secure needed funding, and create supportive cultures that will sustain the change over the long term. Formal leaders play an essential role in this process by enabling and empowering grassroots efforts. PKAL has long been training these kinds of leaders in our Summer Leadership Institutes. These Institutes have now graduated over 200 change agents in STEM education, many of whom are now in positions of dean, provost and president leading change on their campuses.
Change will also require investment. Indeed, the report points to two NSF programs, WIDER (Widening Implementation and Demonstration of Evidence-based Reforms) and TUES (Transforming Undergraduate Education in STEM), as well as a new joint $30 million NSF and Department of Education initiative that will be proposed in the President’s FY 2013 budget (keep your fingers crossed!) that will “develop, validate, and scale up evidence-based approaches to improve student learning at the K-12 and undergraduate levels through a ‘tiered-evidence framework’ to maximize the impact of mathematics education investments.” PKAL’s new project, funded by the W.M. Keck Foundation, aims to build an Institutional STEM Education Effectiveness Framework that we believe will provide a cohesive set of benchmarking tools and institutional change strategies that will help campuses achieve more widespread STEM reform with a purposeful eye toward helping more students succeed.
So stay tuned in for PKAL project updates. We encourage you to join us by participating in one of our regional networks, a summer leadership institute, or the next annual conference on undergraduate STEM education, which is scheduled for November 8-10 in Kansas City, MO. Network meetings happen throughout the year, and two new networks are forming in Chicago and the Washington DC area. Summer Leadership Institute applications are due April 6. Send in your application or, if you are a chair or dean, nominate an emerging STEM faculty leader from your team. Proposals for sessions at the Next Generation STEM Learning conference, organized collaboratively by PKAL and AAC&U, are due March 19. Share and learn with hundreds of others who are dedicated to helping the nation meet the call in this latest report. We are stronger together than we are alone. We look forward to working with you at a PKAL event soon!
This past week I had the honor of being part of the California State University (CSU) system’s Engaged Departments Institute on community engagement and service learning in undergraduate science programs, funded by Learn and Serve America. Five CSU campuses sent teams from chemistry, environmental studies and nursing programs to learn more about community engagement as a pedagogy and to create plans for incorporating it into their courses and programs. Service learning has been touted as one of the “high impact practices” by AAC&U and is one of the more prevalent of the high impact practices (see p.10 of the National Survey of Student Engagement’s 2010 annual report). Helping campuses more deliberately engage students in high impact practices is a major focus of AAC&U’s conferences (see upcoming conference on Student Success), institutes and programs. However, in the STEM disciplines, we don’t often talk much about service learning as one of the pedagogies of engagement (e.g., peer-led team learning, studio classrooms, just-in-time-teaching, problem-based learning, etc.). As it turns out, there are hundreds of examples of programs that incorporate these kinds of activities into their STEM programs – from educational programs in local communities to engineering projects around the globe (go here for some links to resources).
At the institute, I also made some interesting connections between community engagement and the more common engaged pedagogies that are part of the STEM education lexicon. As service learning powerhouses Rick Battistoni (Providence College), Nadinne Cruz (independent practitioner, author and leader), and Tania Mitchell (Stanford University) guided participants through the theory, research and practice that underlie this very popular and powerful pedagogical approach, I was struck by the similarities between it and other engaged pedagogies. For example, it is student-centered and inquiry-based. It is also very deliberately real world focused because students are out in the world, learning within it instead of learning about it in a sterile classroom. How powerful! One campus team proposed a community engagement project as a mechanism to link three general education courses (chemistry, English and mathematics) together for first-year students in connected cohorts at their four-year institution and a partner community college. Students would be enrolled in the three courses simultaneously at each institution, engaged in community projects at the local YMCA, and meet together weekly to connect experiences across the courses and colleges, and in the community.
I also learned that this is a ripe field for further education research in the STEM disciplines. There are many unanswered questions that faculty who engage students in these kinds of programs can undertake. Here are just a few:
- What are the STEM knowledge and skills learned in these kinds of experiences, and how can they best be measured? AAC&U’s VALUE project has a rubric on community engagement. Does it work in STEM community engagement projects? If so, does it need modification? Are new rubrics required?
- What is the impact of community engagement in general education courses on scientific literacy and/or quantitative reasoning skills of undergraduate students? What about scientific literacy of the community members who participate with the students?
- What is the impact of community engagement as a pedagogy for major courses on student retention and completion rates in STEM majors? Success in STEM, in particular for underrepresented students, is a critical issue for colleges and universities around the nation, and perhaps this pedagogy should be added as another tool in our tool chest of effective practices.
I left the institute further energized to continue PKAL’s work to advance “what works” in undergraduate STEM education with new ideas, new knowledge and new connections to the very engaged community engagement and service learning community.
What are your community engagement experiences in STEM courses and programs? Do you know of any studies that connect it to student success and learning outcomes in STEM?
The recent book, Academically Adrift by Arum and Roksa has generated quite a buzz in higher education and the media. The book claims that, overall, students are graduating from college without making significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing as measured by the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA) test. Of course the story isn’t simple, and analysis of CLA data provides only one kind of metric regarding student learning. Regardless, the authors slice and dice the data in a variety of ways and examine it from multiple perspectives.
Of interest to me was what their analysis showed for students in the STEM disciplines. It turns out that students studying science and mathematics are not as adrift as most of their peers, scoring higher on the CLA than other major fields (business, education/social work, health. communications, and even engineering/computer science). They do as well (or better) than their counterparts in the social sciences and humanities. If you follow their analysis further, they suggest that students in the sciences/mathematics and social sciences/humanities do better because they work harder – they write and read more, and spend more time studying. On the flip side, their analysis also suggests that they may do better because they are socially and academically advantaged, highlighting the persistent issue of broader participation of under represented minority (URM) students in STEM (For more on this, see a recent issue of New Directions in Institutional Research on Students of Color in STEM).
Overall, though, this is mostly good news for those of us in science and mathematics. But, what should we make of the analysis for students in other disciplines? As Arum and Roksa point out, we all agree that development of critical thinking and complex reasoning skills are important outcomes of higher education for all students – most institutions have statements along these lines in their university learning outcomes. But, what are we doing to really foster these capacities in ALL students? To me, this points us in the direction of general education. Are we taking science requirements in GE seriously enough? Do students take them seriously enough?
To meet general education requirements in the sciences, students at most institutions choose from a menu of courses that typically span the disciplines – Astronomy 101, Rocks for Jocks, Physics for Poets, Baby Biology and so on. You know the drill. These courses are typically created specifically for the non-major and are often lighter on content, designed to be “easier” than the introductory majors courses. What if we upped the ante for non-major science students and challenged them to think and reason as we expect of our science majors in the context of real world issues? Would they rise to the challenge? Both AAC&U and PKAL are working with campuses and national organizations create more real world focused STEM learning experiences for general education students. For example, AAC&U’s Shared Futures project is working with campuses around the country to create more robust, real world general education experiences. And, PKAL is working with eleven professional societies in STEM to advance the work of their members in educating undergraduates for a more sustainable future.
In 1991, PKAL issued its first report, Volume I: What Works in Building Natural Science Communities. Since that time, PKAL has built a community of dedicated STEM education faculty members and campus leaders across the nation. The PKAL community is comprised of more than 7,000 members at more than 700 campuses around the country, and it is growing. Over the years, PKAL has helped to catalyze the improvement of undergraduate STEM learning environments, and has also facilitated the development and dissemination of best practices in active and engaging pedagogies (pedagogies of engagement). Much has been learned (see PKAL blog post from 12/26/10 for one perspective), but there are still challenges ahead.
The world is a different place in 2011 than it was in 1991, as are our institutions, our faculty, our students and our missions. Public criticism of higher education is high, costs are high and so are expectations. Several national studies suggest that students aren’t gaining much from their college experience (Academically Adrift, for example), and cries from national reports still say we are not doing as well recruiting and retaining STEM majors particularly from diverse populations (see PKAL blog post from 2/23/11). Over 80 posters, sessions and speakers at the recent PKAL-AAC&U Engaged STEM Learning conference in Miami echoed these themes as well as focused on technology, interdisciplinarity, inclusiveness, preparation, assessment and real world experiences. There was a palpable energy among the 450 attendees as they shared, exchanged and learned from one another.
As one way to celebrate PKAL’s anniversary, we would like members of the community to contribute to a “PKAL 20/20 Vision” that will include 20 lessons learned over the past 20 years and 20 challenges ahead for the next 20 years for STEM higher education. What do you think we have learned over the past 20 years, and what you think are the challenges for the next 20 years? Please share your thoughts by commenting on this blog post to give us your feedback. We’ll collect and synthesize it, and keep you posted on the results. Not only will this help PKAL more strategically plan its conferences, programs and activities in the future, but we hope it will help you as you continue your efforts to make STEM experiences in higher education better meet the needs of our 21st century students.
February is Black History Month so it is a good opportunity to write about the issues, achievements and opportunities for engaging African Americans, and other underrepresented minorities (URM), in STEM learning at our colleges and universities. This is an area where many have been focusing attention and effort, from the National Science Foundation to individual campuses. One example of a campus story is that of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and its successful Meyerhoffs Scholars Program. Freeman Hrabowski, president of UMBC, talks about this program in a recent online interview, and points to the new report from the National Academies on Increasing Minority Participation in STEM.
In reading this report, you will find that improvements have been made – more URM students are identifying interest in studying STEM and they now comprise 26.2% of STEM majors, however we have a long way to go in closing the gap between interest and enrollment and graduation in STEM. Financial support turns out to be a key factor for success and completion for low income and minority students. But, there are other strategies campuses can utilize to ensure more URM students are successful in STEM. The report highlights seven strategies, summarized below:
- Look at data and act (at course, program, and institution levels)
- Pay attention to indicators (retention and completion)
- Take on introductory courses (turn them from gatekeepers to gateways)
- Don’t hesitate to make demands (set high standards)
- Assign clear responsibility for student success (if we all own it, nobody does)
- Insist that presidents step up to the plate (leadership is essential)
- Bring back the ones you lose (be proactive and responsive).
The report contains more data, statistics, stories and recommendations that should be useful to campuses as they continue to consider how to broaden access and success in STEM for all students.
The National Academies study on the status, contributions and future directions of Discipline-Based Education Research has posted its commissioned papers:
1. Papers on education research in biology, physics, geoscience and engineering
2. Papers on learning science and epistemologies across the sciences
We continue to follow this study and look forward to its report. These papers present robust analyses and syntheses of the contributions – from graduate programs to areas of investigation, significant findings and unanswered questions – of educational researchers in these scientific disciplines and engineering. Some of the papers are pretty heady, but offer good summaries by experts in these fields.
Also, check out the commissioned papers and summary report from the Academies workshops on Promising Practices in undergraduate STEM education.
Next up (I hope), the new Science Framework that will be used to develop common core science standards for K-12.
As Jeanne Narum, founding director of Project Kaleidoscope, and I have been working together this past year during PKAL’s transition into partnership with AAC&U, we have been discussing our perspectives on how the landscape of STEM in higher education has changed since PKAL started 20 years ago. In 1991, I wasn’t exactly in the conversation as Jeanne was, although I was immersed in the situation as a graduate student and teaching assistant at UC Davis. As my career advanced as a professor at Cal Poly, I engaged in SOTL (scholarship of teaching and learning) projects, led workshops at our Center for Teaching and Learning and eventually started doing research in genetics education. These experiences form the foundation of my perspective on STEM education, which has been broadened by the wider view I now have as Director of PKAL. It has been fascinating and fun to talk with Jeanne about her view, which is informed by 20 years of work in STEM education at the national level. We’ve shared, laughed, debated and learned from one another (me, more than she I’m sure!). In the spirit of this conversation, I’d like to share with you what I think has changed and look forward to your perspective, too. (more…)
I recently attended a public meeting of the National Academies’ study on the Status, Contributions, and Future Direction of Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) where scholars presented papers on the current status and contributions of the scientific disciplines’ educational research fields. It was fascinating to hear these summaries from well-established fields, such as physics education, and relative newcomers, such as engineering education. As I listened, several cross-cutting themes were evident (e.g., how students struggle to apply abstract conceptual knowledge to specific disciplinary contexts) as was the definite influence of the discipline itself in shaping the educational research questions (e.g., in engineering education, there is a greater focus on professional skill building). And, some interesting questions emerged. (more…)
I just returned from a visit to a university in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I spent a week talking with them about the status and future of their science and mathematics programs. Dubai is an interesting place, with its rapid development and forward-looking vision against the backdrop of one the most ancient cultures and places on the planet. In many ways, what is happening in Dubai epitomizes our 21st century world and the global challenges we face. In higher education, they face the similar challenges as the U.S.; that is, how does a university effectively prepare its young people to work and live in this complex interconnected world. Of course, science and mathematics preparation is critical. (more…)
Crowd science – where masses of people participate in data collection for science projects – is growing, according to a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/article/The-Rise-of-Crowd-Science/65707). Astronomy is the area in which crowd science has been most frequently used, which makes sense given the field’s massive scale and large datasets. One example is the ten-year old SETI@home project , in which people with Internet-connected home or office computers run a program in the background that analyzes signals from radio telescopes, searching for extraterrestrial life (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/index.php). Apparently, millions of computers have participated in this distributed science experiment. And then there is Galaxy Zoo (http://www.galaxyzoo.org), a project in which people help classify galaxies from Hubble Telescope images. Millions of galaxies have been classified by hundreds of thousands of people. Recently, I came across a biology project called Project Noah (Networked Organisms and Habitats http://www.networkedorganisms.com). In this project, people are invited to share images of the wild things they encounter in their everyday lives. It maps “spottings” on a Google map interface so users can get to know their local area through the eyes (and images) of others in the community. And then there is the Great Sunflower Project, (http://www.greatsunflower.org) which employs gardening volunteers in a large-scale bee-watching and tracking experiment. There’s even a Project Noah mobile app (of course there is!). Citizen trackers also helped out in the recent Gulf oil spill. And the list of projects like these is continuously growing. (more…)
