Building Capacity: STEM Faculty Professional Learning in the Zone of Proximal Development

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The Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions Program (HSI Program) aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education and build capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI program will also generate new knowledge about how to achieve these aims. This project fulfills part of those aims by building institutional capacity for improving undergraduate STEM teaching and learning. This project, a collaboration between California State University-Sacramento and the University of California-Irvine, will support efforts to improve the teaching effectiveness of STEM faculty and to advance knowledge about strategies that lead to increased use of evidence-based and equity-minded teaching strategies. Using online, hybrid, and face-to-face training formats, the project will provide customized professional learning programs to help STEM faculty improve their teaching. The training will also help faculty become aware of the roles of diversity, intercultural competence, and critical consciousness in the development and persistence of students, including those who are underrepresented in STEM. The faculty learning programs will be designed to meet faculty where they are in their professional career and in their understanding of equitable classroom practices. Over the project's funding period, the investigators estimate that the project will help approximately 125 faculty implement evidence-based and equity-minded teaching strategies. These faculty have the potential to improve the learning of more than 37,000 science and math undergraduate students, as well as to broaden the participation and success of students underrepresented in STEM.Developmental and adaptive over time, the faculty development curriculum will include 1) fundamental teaching and learning skills; 2) discipline specific, evidence-based best practices; and 3) scholarship and critical consciousness for equity and institutional change. It will implement and assess a model to transform STEM cultural practices that focuses on faculty. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches, large amounts of faculty and student data will be disaggregated to examine the impact of a developmental set of faculty professional learning programs. Instructional and curricular products created by faculty in these programs and their effect on student learning in developmental math, gateway, and lower division math and science courses will be analyzed. A quantitative, quasi-experimental study using institutional and program data, and a qualitative longitudinal study using observation and interview data will examine how faculty and students change because of STEM faculty participation in a learning program that is customized to their zone of proximal development.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.