RCN-UBE: Networking STEM Initiatives To Enhance (NSITE) Adoption of Evidence-Based Practices

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This project will establish a network that allows national STEM education reform initiatives to join forces to speed adoption of effective teaching practices in post-secondary STEM education and to provide a deeper understanding of how organizations change. At present, college STEM educators rarely have formal training in teaching. As such, many teach the way they were taught using a passive, lecture method that leads to low retention and success rates for students who enter college declaring STEM majors, especially those from under-represented groups. The resulting STEM workforce is therefore unable to meet the current demand for those professionals and does not represent the diversity of the society it serves. Over the past decade many initiatives have emerged to address this issue and have made some progress in spreading awareness and some solutions. While STEM education is changing, the pace is slower than the shifting societal demands. This new network will allow established initiatives to share effective strategies and to join forces testing new strategies to increase the rate of progress in STEM education reform and increase the success and retention of all students in STEM majors. To meet the needs of the future workforce, we need to retain a larger and more diverse population of STEM undergraduates. A barrier to increasing retention, specifically increasing participation by under-represented groups, is the continued predominance of a transmission model of post-secondary STEM education which has become a marked issue of social justice. To speed adoption of evidence-based practices in post-secondary life sciences education, the goal of this proposal is to build connections between prominent education transformation efforts, starting in the life sciences, to foster interactions that increase the efficacy of each initiative. Using a three-phased Networked Improvement Communities format, a combination of four in-person and multiple virtual meetings will be used to improve knowledge and awareness, foster communication and facilitate coordinated action to identify and implement common solutions to move the needle on common challenges. Ten prominent life sciences initiatives serving thousands of educators and impacting hundreds of thousands of students will build relationships, analyze common challenges, identify steps for change, and subsequently test changes to collect and share data. The last phase will focus on building capacity to scale efforts based upon a deeper understanding of organizational change strategies. This project will contribute to increasing and diversifying the STEM workforce by growing a network to enhance the impact of the initiatives involved whose common mission is to increase adoption of evidence-based teaching in post-secondary STEM education, and improving the impact of a broader community of reform efforts by increasing our knowledge of effective organizational change strategies. This project is being jointly funded by the Directorate for Biological Sciences, Division of Biological Infrastructure, and the Directorate for Education and Human Resources, Division of Undergraduate Education as part of their efforts to address the challenges posed in Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action (http://visionandchange/finalreport/).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.