Collaborative Research: Scaling Support for Non-tenure Track STEM Faculty through Learning Communities and Design Teams

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With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources Program (IUSE:EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by improving the STEM teaching and learning environment for undergraduate STEM students. It will do so by increasing supports for non-tenure track faculty members, who teach most of undergraduate STEM courses, including the critical introductory courses. The project proposes to develop a national, research-based Institute for supporting non-tenure track faculty, which will be held annually for four consecutive years. The Institute will recruit small teams of faculty and administrators from 50 college and university campuses. There, the teams will learn about supports for non-tenure track faculty and develop a plan for supporting the work of adjunct faculty on their campuses. Examples of supports include professional development learning communities, as well as campus policies and practices that support non-tenure track faculty. Although many efforts are underway to develop and adopt effective curricula and pedagogies in STEM courses, none of these important innovations will succeed without addressing support for the non-tenure track faculty who teach the majority of these courses. Thus, this project is significant because it addresses an overlooked challenge in undergraduate STEM that has enormous potential to improve STEM education broadly. In addition to developing the Institute for supporting non-tenure track faculty, the project will engage in research on two areas that will contribute to the goals of better supporting non-tenure track faculty in STEM: 1. formative research aimed at evaluation of the Institute; and 2. summative research focused on the Institute's goals and outcomes. The research will create new knowledge about models of faculty learning communities, particularly for non-tenure track STEM faculty. The Institute and the related research will be significant to the undergraduate STEM reform community by providing information about ways to use structured topical learning communities to improve teaching among non-tenure track faculty. The major potential contributions of this project to society include the impacts on the 50 participating colleges and universities, which will have improved support for their non-tenure track faculty and, thus, helped these faculty to improve their instruction. Because of the project, thousands of faculty will have professional development opportunities to improve STEM introductory courses, hundreds of thousands of STEM students will experience better STEM learning environments, and a national model will be developed for how to best support non-tenure track faculty in improving their teaching and learning environments. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.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.