A Longitudinal Study of the Role of Qualitative Evidence in Creating and Sustaining Student-centered Teaching Cultures

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This project aims to serve the national interest in excellent undergraduate STEM education. To this end, it intends to help higher education become more inclusive by improving the decisions that science faculty make about their teaching methods. Initiatives aimed at changing how science faculty teach often rely on numerical data. However, qualitative data such as personal stories and examples can help to sustain change. This project aims to encourage faculty to use qualitative data through two new faculty development efforts: 1) a peer coaching program for faculty teaching in a summer bridge program for incoming science majors from underrepresented groups; and 2) a faculty learning community where faculty will learn to conduct their own qualitative research projects. After developing and implementing the faculty professional development, the project will then study how faculty share and use the resulting qualitative data to guide teaching decisions going forward.This longitudinal research project builds on a data-in-practice framework to examine how experience and qualitative data can be developed, shared, and integrated into a local teaching culture to encourage inclusive, student-centered teaching practices. The project will examine change among individual faculty through interviews, classroom observations, and syllabus review before and after participation. To see organization-level change, the researchers will observe course design teams and public discussions of pedagogy to see how faculty use the different types of data generated within the faculty development activities. The project will produce two replicable faculty development models that can be shared via webinars. Results of this research into the role of qualitative data in pedagogical decision making may offer the STEM education community a new mechanism to foster cultural change. 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.