CAREER - The Winding Roads to Effective Teaching: Characterizing the Progressions in Instructional Knowledge and Practices of STEM Faculty

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National initiatives to improve undergraduate science education build upon decades of research on and development of effective teaching practices. These evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) promote students' conceptual understanding and favorable attitudes about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), with the greatest impacts observed among women and members of underrepresented groups. By improving retention rates and attracting a more diverse student population to the sciences, these research-based ways of teaching science can help address the national need to educate STEM-literate graduates and advance workforce development goals. The challenge is fostering the effective use of these teaching practices on a national scale. STEM faculty members are at the core of any successful instructional reform, yet surprisingly little is known about them with respect to their teaching. As extensive resources and efforts are currently focused on transforming STEM instructional practices at the college level nationally, there is a critical need to characterize STEM faculty members' knowledge base for teaching, instructional practices, relationships between the two, as well as progressions of this knowledge and these practices over time. Moreover, there is a need to characterize these progressions under varying reform environments (short workshops versus semester-long professional development; different departmental and institutional culture around teaching), as well as for faculty at various points of their academic career. Results of this foundational research will provide critical insight into the diverse progressions of STEM faculty members' knowledge base for teaching and instructional practices, which will inform current national and local reform efforts that aim at the widespread implementation of EBIPs in STEM courses in college settings.This NSF Faculty Early Career Development project will address a wide gap in the discipline-based education research literature about STEM faculty members' knowledge base for teaching and instructional practices. Specifically, the project will characterize how STEM faculty members' practical theories and their integration with instructional practices evolve in the contexts of different (a) levels of experience as faculty members; (b) climate, culture, and rewards structures of departments and institutions; and (c) formal and informal professional development experiences. The research is grounded in the Teacher-Centered Systemic Reform Model, which describes faculty members' decision-making processes about teaching and influences impacting these processes. A convergent, longitudinal mixed methods design will be implemented to address the research questions. Quantitative data will include surveys, classroom observations, and course artifacts. The qualitative component will consist of an embedded collective case study. Data collected will include interviews with faculty and course artifacts. These research activities will result in an enhanced understanding of STEM faculty members' a) pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) elements, b) orientations toward teaching and beliefs about teaching, and c) instructional practices, as well as d) alignment among these three constructs under various contexts (e.g., faculty at different levels of their academic career, faculty experiencing different types of departmental and institutional climate, and faculty participating in different types of formal and informal professional development). This foundational research will further inform the theoretical framework and provide critical insights on effective practices for STEM faculty professional development to the STEM community at large. The research and education program will be fully integrated: one component of the education program, a professional development program for STEM faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL), will serve as the context for part of the study; in turn, the results of the study will inform the design and implementation of the professional development program but will also provide opportunities to offer one-on-one teaching consultations with UNL STEM faculty and will inform the design of a graduate-level curriculum on reformed instructional practices.