Leadership Commitment

The STEM Institutional Transformation Action Research (SITAR) Project, housed in the Center for STEM Learning, aims to improve undergraduate STEM education by professionalizing educational practice through measurement, assessment, and cultural change.

In 2014, the University of Michigan launched an NSF-funded program to reinvent introductory teaching and learning in the core STEM disciplines.  REBUILD (Researching Evidence-Based Undergraduate Instructional and Learning Developments) aimed to promote recruitment, retention, and academic excellence in STEM disciplines by catalyzing the use of evidence-based teaching methods and learning analytics.  Toward this end, REBUILD faculty and postdocs led reform efforts in traditionally lecture-based, high-enrollment courses and labs in Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Math, and Physics.

The  Center for STEM Learning: Housed within the Graduate School, the Center for STEM Learning (CSL) was officially formed on December 20, 2012. CSL is an outcome of the NSF Grant “I3: Towards a Center for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) Education.”

The National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT) is headquartered at CU Boulder, and a non-profit organization chartered in 2004 by the National Science Foundation to increase the participation of girls and women in computing. Before NCWIT was formed, programs focusing on women and computing (K-12, post secondary, or corporate) existed mostly in isolation, without the benefit of shared best practices, effective resources, communication with others, or national reach.

In early 2016, the REBUILD committee harnessed the momentum provided by REBUILD to launch a university-wide Foundational Course Initiative. In partnership with Michigan’s Center for Research on Teaching and Learning, we talked to hundreds of administrators, faculty, staff, and students representing numerous schools and colleges, departments, student support programs, residential learning communities, and other units at Michigan.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's (UW-Madison) Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning promotes professional development in teaching for graduate students and post-docs so that they can successfully implement and advance effective teaching practices for diverse student audiences as part of their careers.

First-Year Interest Groups (FIGs) are designed to help first-year students make the transition to UW-Madison, both academically and socially. A FIG is a "learning community" of about 20 students with similar interests who are enrolled in a cluster of classes together.

To improve learning, the Swanson School of Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh is introducing a flipped, or inverted, classroom model in which direct learning (lecture) takes place outside of class, while class time is used for active learning.

The University of Pennsylvania is supporting faculty in making use of Structured, Active, In-class Learning (SAIL) in their teaching. SAIL classes begin with the related premises that students benefit from learning by doing and that class time should be used to help students learn to work with material.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is creating a support framework to facilitate the implementation of evidence-based teaching practices in large courses that have traditionally been taught by the lecture method.