Collaborative Research: Building a Culture of Active Learning through Course-Based Communities of Transformation

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This project aims to improve undergraduate STEM teaching for more than 20,000 students and help develop models that can improve learning in programs across the country. The primary goal of the project is to develop and support a university culture that values the incorporation of active learning practices in undergraduate STEM courses and programs. Teams of faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students will be brought together to form course-based communities of transformation that will support these changes. Over the course of the project, communities will be created in four STEM departments that teach thousands of students in targeted gateway courses in Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and Computer Science. These multi-generational communities will receive training on active learning techniques. Using this knowledge and with support from a network of learning communities, they will develop materials and assessments that emphasize active learning and student engagement. Community leaders will receive additional training on grassroots leadership and organizational change in higher education. These leaders will demonstrate the value of active learning techniques, encouraging faculty who are more hesitant to make changes in their courses. Engaging a large number of faculty members, along with administrators who can promote these efforts more widely, will help change teaching norms throughout the university.The project will investigate how course-based communities of transformation can be used to develop a culture of active and inquiry-based learning in STEM. A significant body of research has shown that active and inquiry-based learning improves student attitudes, retention, and understanding, particularly for underrepresented groups in STEM. Nevertheless, motivating faculty to change their teaching practices remains a challenge. Course-based communities of transformation in the Mathematics, Physics, Biology, and Computer Science Departments will lead instructional changes in specified high-enrollment undergraduate courses. Learning communities that span departments and include key university leadership will support the course-based communities and provide top-down efforts to complement the bottom-up course-focused change. Through analysis of interviews, surveys, course materials, and other key documents, the project will examine how the culture change process unfolds at the faculty, department, and organizational levels. Analysis will also focus on the relationship between department-level change and organizational learning. Combined with a better understanding of organizational change within the university setting, the multi-generational community of transformation model will help other institutions succeed in efforts to change their own campus teaching cultures.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.