PRISM: Changing Pedagogy of STEM Faculty

Author: Ronald J. Henry

Study design:
The theory of change underlying the work is that many SM faculty are not aware of how students learn and by providing faculty with an opportunity to learn similar lessons to the findings in the literature, faculty will modify their courses, more students will learn and more students will become SM majors and/or teachers. A combination of statewide and regional strategies was designed for IHE faculty from science, mathematics, science education, and mathematics education. IHE faculty were engaged through an Institute, mini-grants program, and an Academy.

The Institute is designed to provide faculty a Learning Community in which to examine their own classroom practice, and to learn about, experiment with, and share various effective teaching approaches in science and mathematics that actively engage the learner, in ways on which others can build. Each of the USG core partners from the four regions has representation on the steering committee for the statewide Institute which sponsors two two-day workshops per year. Each of the four regions has regional institutes to stimulate ongoing initiatives and discussions in the time intervals between statewide workshops. Participants in the institutes include IHE faculty and high school science and mathematics teachers. Attendance is limited to 80 participants at each statewide Institute, with 20 participants from each region. The meetings, the first of which was held in April 2004, feature plenary speakers who are credible national practitioners who engaged participants actively in the sessions. There is structured time for both regional, cross-discipline sharing and for cross-regional within discipline sharing.

Regional institutes provide the ongoing stimulus to faculty. Faculty who attend the statewide meetings share ideas with their colleagues at meetings of the regional institutes. There are many more faculty involved in the regional institutes than are invited to the statewide meetings. In particular, regional institutes have provided arenas for faculty to learn about 'action research' or 'classroom research' and institutional research boards (IRB), issues with which SM faculty are not normally familiar.

The Northeast (NE) Georgia region initiated a mini-grants program in summer 2004 to provide funding to IHE faculty for innovative projects related to improving instruction and student learning in science and mathematics at the undergraduate level. Twenty proposals were funded in this initial round. The request for proposals was broad in order to capture wide-spread interest. The program was designed to 1) promote participation in the statewide Institute and support the work throughout the year; and 2) focus efforts to stimulate change in undergraduate courses which is directly related to the utilized theory of change. The other regions followed NE Georgia region's lead and developed their own mini-grant programs with the same focus and additional foci. In the initial round of regional mini-grant proposals, 43 SM IHE faculty were funded. Of these faculty, it was the first time that 34 of them had been involved in implementing new teaching strategies.

A statewide Academy for Learning for over 100 IHE faculty from 23 USG institutions was held in five three-day sessions from December 2005 to September 2006. Its purpose was to focus on learning, rather than on teaching. The Academy was intended to help participants to gain in-depth understanding of changes underway in public schools, especially the need to model a standards-based approach in college courses; to help IHE faculty redesign their courses to be learner-centered and to use assessment to improve learning. Following the statewide academy, individual campuses developed local academies and expanded participation to other SM faculty.

Data collection:
Data was collected from participant surveys following the statewide Institutes and the Academy. In addition, a survey of mini-grant participants was conducted. In all courses that had interventions, student success rates (grade of A, B, or C) were compared with similar courses without interventions.

Analysis:
Participants have rated each of the statewide institutes highly. The meetings have been successful because they feature plenary speakers who are credible national practitioners who have engaged participants actively in the sessions. The speakers have modeled the behavior in their sessions that was being promoted for large-sized classes. For example, for the Institute held in November 2006, there was a mean of 4.78 on a six-point scale with 93% of the respondents rating the institute as useful (rating of 4 or above on a six-point scale). In the evaluation survey of participants at the February 2005 Institute, 85% (34 of 40) respondents stated that they learned about student assessment strategies that they will try in the courses that they teach. Similar positive data were obtained following each of the statewide Institutes or Academy meetings. The PRISM evaluation team analyzed data after each of the statewide meetings and provided feedback for improvement of subsequent meetings.

In June 2007, the NE Georgia region conducted a survey of 33 mini-grant recipients that included only arts and science or agricultural undergraduate course interventions or the assessment of course interventions and which resulted in 14 faculty responses. All 13 successful course interventions have been continued in subsequent offerings of the course; 7 reported that course interventions have transferred to other courses taught by the same faculty; and 9 indicated that course interventions have been sustained and/or expanded to other sections of the same course - taught by different faculty.

Examples of data collection of student surveys and grades include: In one set of biology courses which were redesigned to be theme-based, student's attitude towards biology was compared for courses with and without interventions in three categories: those describing the student's perception about the relevance and significance of the material covered in the biology course, those describing the student's interest in biology, and those describing the confidence of the student in biology. Overall, the absolute values for each statement on the relevance and significance of biology showed females and males about the same in the redesigned course and mostly more favorable than their counterparts in the traditional course. When the data for interest in biology statements are broken down by gender, there is striking difference between males and females, especially in the redesigned section, where most of the gain in interest was by the females. For confidence in biology, females in the redesigned sections scored better on every question than both females in the traditional sections and males in the redesigned section. For fall 2005, the DFW rate in the redesigned course was less than half that of the traditional course, with 12% of the students receiving a grade of D, F or W in the redesigned sections, while 30% of the students in the traditional sections received a grade of D, F, or W. Similar results are obtained in subsequent semesters.

For an intervention that modified introductory biology labs from cookbook to inquiry-based, three pre post assessments were used. One was for science literacy which examines whether students understand how to read texts dealing with scientific subjects. A second one examines student's science proficiency at designing and interpreting scientific experiments and results. A third one examines student's confidence in doing and interpreting science based activities and materials. Analysis of the data indicates that students in the inquiry based labs showed significantly greater improvement that than students in the cookbook labs on the science literacy test. On the science proficiency skills test students in the inquiry based labs also showed significantly greater improvement in their ability to design experiments and create/work with graphs than students in the cookbook labs but no difference was seen regarding quantitative skills or identification of dependent/independent variables. Students in the inquiry lab had significantly lower scores on the confidence test for one of the two semesters examined.