Bridging to STEM Excellence: Leveraging a Consortium of National STEM Education Initiatives to Improve Undergraduate STEM Teaching and Learning

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With support from the NSF Improving Undergraduate STEM Education Program: Education and Human Resources (IUSE:EHR), this project aims to serve the national interest by increasing capacity for institutional transformation in STEM education. Implementing research-based improvements to STEM programs and instruction at all levels is a national priority. This priority is underpinned by the recognition that evidence-based teaching and related programmatic support (e.g., faculty professional development; connections with student services; and co-curricular activities) improve outcomes for all students and increase participation by groups that are underrepresented in STEM. This project seeks to create a pilot program to accelerate adoption of department- and program-level interventions proven to improve student learning outcomes and retention in STEM. The project plans to establish and train a consultancy corps of experienced faculty developers from five national initiatives that aim to improve undergraduate STEM education. The initiatives include the BioQUEST Curricular Consortium, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers, the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement's Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibilities (SENCER) program, The Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning (POGIL) Project, and the Summer Institutes for Scientific Teaching. Each three-member team that works with an institution will include representation from three of the five initiatives, chosen to match the institution's desired change focus. The five partner institutions with whom this approach will be piloted are Bakersfield College, California State University-Chico, Georgia State University, The Ohio State University, and the University of Richmond. Through this project, five well-established initiatives will come together as a Consortium to work with an initial set of five institutional partners. This effort leverages NSF investments over the past two decades by supporting the integration of national, NSF-supported STEM education initiatives to provide holistic support that will help educators achieve improved student outcomes. Consortium members will collaboratively build a community of practice and develop a consultancy corps that is knowledgeable in the improvement practices of all five initiatives. The Consortium will then undertake a cycle of consultation, action, and follow-up support with the five institutional partners. The goal of the project is to accelerate change in higher education by developing a community of practice among five national initiatives, thus increasing their reach and coordinating their support for professional development and programmatic change. In addition, the program's consultancy program will serve as a bridge between these coordinated national initiatives and individual institutional efforts to improve instruction and student support practices. Evaluation activities will provide formative and summative feedback on the consultancy model, using a community of practice lens. Research conducted during the project will examine the impact of the change efforts at each institution, including the development of new tools to study readiness for change. The collective expertise of Consortium members and their available resources and approaches, along with a set of new materials to support the consultancy corps, will be made available through a public web repository. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. This project is in the Institutional and Community Transformation track, through which the IUSE: EHR 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.