The impetus for AAU to undertake a national initiative to improve the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate STEM education at research universities was several-fold.
It was grounded in an increasing national focus on STEM education combined with a set of high-level policy reports calling for improvements in undergraduate STEM education, a growing body of scholarship on teaching and learning in the STEM fields, and concern that research universities were particularly vulnerable to public criticism about the quality and effectiveness of undergraduate STEM teaching.
Of particular concern were the high attrition rates of undergraduate students at major research universities who would declare STEM majors but who would subsequently drop out of STEM fields or fail to complete a degree in any field, with many of them attributing their decisions in part to the poor quality of faculty instruction.
At the time AAU initiated its efforts, many students who intended to major in a STEM field were not completing their degrees, or completing degrees in non-STEM disciplines. According to National Science Foundation (NSF) data, university enrollments continue to increase, as do numbers of bachelor’s degrees awarded in both STEM and non-STEM fields.
However, STEM degrees as a proportion of total bachelor’s degrees have remained relatively constant at about 15-17 percent. Moreover, the proportion of freshmen intending to major in STEM fields exhibits a similar pattern, remaining relatively constant at around 25 percent over the past 15 years.
This gap between the percentage of freshmen who intend to major in STEM fields and the percentage of awarded bachelor’s degrees in those fields is a persistent trend.
In the 2005 Survey of the American Freshman, as reported by the House Science Committee, half of all students who began in the physical or biological sciences and 60 percent of those in mathematics dropped out of these fields by their senior year, compared with a 30 percent drop-out rate in the humanities and social sciences. According to Talking About Leaving: Why Undergraduates Leave the Sciences, by Elaine Seymour and Nancy M. Hewitt, 44 percent of entering freshmen in 1987 who intended to major in a STEM field switched to a non-STEM major by 1991 (this percentage varies somewhat among specific STEM disciplines); for non-STEM majors, only about 30 percent switched to another group of majors.
The Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) reported that only 38 percent of students who entered STEM bachelor’s programs in the 1993-1994 academic year earned a bachelor’s degree in a STEM field within six years. The HERI analysis also showed that, across all races, students who started in STEM fields were less likely to complete degrees in any field than students who intended to major in non-STEM fields.
AAU reflected on the question: Why do so many students who enter college intending to major in a STEM discipline fail to earn a bachelor’s degree in STEM?
As reported by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation (ITIF), several studies have shown that most students who leave STEM do so between the first and second year, rather than later in their college career. Seymour and Hewitt surveyed students and obtained the now-infamous result that 90 percent of students who switched out of STEM fields cited poor teaching as a concern.
ITIF summarizes Seymour and Hewitt’s results: “Of the 23 most commonly cited reasons for switching out of STEM, all but 7 had something to do with the pedagogical experience.”
Undergraduate teaching was clearly a major factor in students choosing to leave STEM fields, and because most students who leave STEM do so during the first two years of college, those years are especially critical in terms of teaching.
This pattern continues to be borne out by more recent data and reports. According to a National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) study that examined attrition rates in STEM majors for students who began college in the 20032004 academic year, 48% of students who entered a bachelor’s degree program in STEM between 2003 and 2008 had left STEM fields by spring 2009. Roughly half of these leavers switched their major to a non-STEM field, and the others exited college before earning a degree.
The National Research Council appointed the Committee on Barriers and Opportunities in Completing 2-Year and 4-Year STEM Degrees to address the barriers that prevent students from earning the STEM degrees to which they aspire and to identify opportunities to promote completion of undergraduate STEM degrees. The committee concluded that there is an opportunity to expand and diversify the nation’s STEM workforce and STEM-skilled workers in all fields if there is a commitment to appropriately support the diverse, complex pathways students take to earn STEM degrees.
At the same time, AAU staff had long recognized that its member institutions were vulnerable to criticism on undergraduate STEM teaching, learning, and retention such as those raised in the 1998 Boyer Commission Report on educating undergraduates in the research university. Also, the ever-growing national discourse to justify the cost and value of an undergraduate degree at a research university was a topic of discussion among the AAU leadership.
A comprehensive meta-analysis of 225 studies revealed that undergraduate students in classes with traditional lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use active learning methods.
STEM fields are critical to generating the ideas, products, and industries that drive our nation’s global competitiveness, and with the passage of time, they are becoming even more crucial to our country’s success. Therefore, it is important that students, who will comprise our future workforce and leaders, are educated using the best and most effective methods in STEM education.
Universities must encourage students who enter college intending to major in a STEM field in their educational pursuits, and support the fundamental STEM literacy of students pursuing non-STEM majors. Moreover, schools must work to broaden participation in STEM fields of study. Institutions have a responsibility to ensure that any of their students can learn in STEM classrooms and pursue careers in STEM fields if they desire to do so.
The latest research on teaching and learning has also led to the development of instructional methods that are more engaging and effective at helping students learn. This effect has been extensively documented in STEM fields. A comprehensive meta-analysis of 225 studies revealed that undergraduate students in classes with traditional lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use active learning methods. Also, a growing body of evidence demonstrates that learning gains from using these teaching approaches in highly structured classrooms are particularly good for students from disadvantaged and diverse backgrounds and that active learning confers disproportionate benefits for female students in male-dominated fields.
Furthermore, the national policy environment has begun to reflect a more coordinated effort to improve undergraduate STEM education across relevant organizations and actors. There has been a shift away from isolated directives within individual disciplines and nationally funded efforts that do not require long-lasting reforms within academic institutions. Today many funders are designing solicitations with expectations for projects to build and sustain institutional change.
As AAU reflected on STEM undergraduate education in the 2009-2012 timeframe, it found that despite the problem of students leaving STEM fields and the movement toward developing and supporting systemic reform in STEM undergraduate education to address growing public pressures, a majority of university STEM faculty members who teach undergraduate science and engineering classes remained inattentive to the shifting landscape. Student-centered, evidence-based teaching practices were not yet the norm in most undergraduate STEM education courses, and the desired magnitude of change in STEM pedagogy had not materialized.
A principal reason for the lack of widespread pedagogical reform in STEM is the use of theoretical perspectives whose focus is primarily on individual faculty members and the students in their classrooms. Much of this literature centers on micro-level assessments of the classroom, which is crucial to assessing the effect of pedagogy on student learning.
Kelly Hogan, STEM Teaching Associate Professor and Assistant Dean of Instructional Innovation, teaching in a high-structure, high-engagement introductory biology classroom at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Yet this literature often ignores the larger institutional and external environment and fails to account for the costs and political challenges in scaling up reforms. Concern about more macro-level environments requires a change in assessment from looking solely for benefits and learning outcomes at the course or program level to a more nuanced consideration of factors that facilitate, impede, or influence wide-spread transformation in undergraduate STEM education.
To increase the implementation and widespread adoption of instructional strategies shown to be effective requires a model of change that includes the roles of research evidence, leadership, resources, faculty workload and rewards, and faculty professional development. In this context, empirical evidence is only one part of the reform effort.
As Fairweather has explained, “research evidence of instructional effectiveness is a necessary but not sufficient condition” for faculty to change their teaching practices. Fairweather suggests that the assumption that “the instructional role can be addressed independently from other aspects of the faculty position, particularly research, and from the larger institutional context” is misguided.
Given the size and scale of higher education, changing individual faculty members or even isolated departments will have minimal impact. To achieve long-lasting and broadly disseminated educational reforms, efforts must go well beyond this micro-level focus on faculty members.
Scholars recommend that sustainable STEM education reform requires engaging institutional leaders such as department chairs, deans, and presidents in rethinking institutional structures and culture. A recent case study of undergraduate STEM education reform conducted at the University of Colorado Boulder found that top-down (campus-level academic leaders) and bottom-up (faculty) reforms alone are inadequate for sustained institutional improvement in undergraduate education; middle-out (chairs, college deans) reforms are also required.
Austin’s well-documented systems approach to change also suggests that external stakeholders such as disciplinary societies, government agencies, and employers are crucial to long-lasting change.
In sum, transforming undergraduate STEM education requires multiple facilitators or “levers” pushing for change that can counterbalance the forces that sustain ineffective instructional practices and address the obstacles inherent in the system in which educational innovations take place.
The AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative launched in 2011 is specifically aimed at assisting AAU institutions to implement what we already know works in STEM education, and assuring that these teaching practices are widely implemented in STEM departments to support the learning and persistence of students in STEM on a large scale. AAU’s approach of developing a shared priority among multiple stakeholders rather than only individual faculty members offers a potentially transformative approach to STEM education reform.
This ambitious project, which seeks to increase the importance of undergraduate STEM education in the nation’s top research universities, is promoting the implementation of a more systemic view of educational reform within academia.