Educational Practices

Cornell University is undertaking campus-wide and discipline-specific initiatives to provide graduate students and postdoctoral scholars with practical experience in planning for, stimulating, and assessing undergraduate learning with lunchtime workshops and targeted events on developing assessment skills.

Cornell University is working to restructure the core course sequences for engineering and physics majors. The primary focus of this initiative is to transition from traditional lecture to more deliberate pedagogical approaches to enhance student learning and retention.

Cornell University has initiated institution-wide changes to the core undergraduate biology curriculum to transition from traditional lecture based instruction to incorporation of active learning techniques. The first phase of this five-year transition will focus on four large introductory courses.

Cornell University’s College of Engineering offers Academic Excellence Workshops to enhance student learning of content in several key gateway courses in engineering. Designed to enhance student understanding, the workshops feature peer-facilitated group work on problems at or above the level of course instruction.

Brown University focuses on improving the mathematical competency among STEM majors by seeking to introduce evidence-based, high impact practices in first and second year STEM courses. The goal, reducing attrition from science and improving students’ identification with science as a career.

Modern biological research requires collaboration of scientists with expertise in math, chemistry and computer science to develop unique solutions to common problems.  Traditional introductory biology laboratory curricula, however, often do not emphasize connections between physical and natural sciences covering a vast array of unrelated topics in cook-book style labs with predictable results.