Cultural Change

TRESTLE is a 7-institution NSF-funded project to support improvements in undergraduate STEM education through (1) supporting course design projects, (2) enhancing educational expertise in departments, and (3) building communities within and across campuses to enhance the impact of local experts.

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.

As a direct result of the AAU STEM Initiative, we have substantial evidence of institutional change occurring at Washington University. This includes the funding of a new initiative to continue increasing adoption of evidence-based pedagogies in STEM, as well as expansion and adoption of programs begun by the AAU Initiative.

The University of Pittsburgh's Discipline-Based Science Education Research Center (dB-SERC) promotes and supports evidence-based teaching practices which bridge the gap between teaching and 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.