Improving Undergraduate Student Persistence, Performance, and Perspectives in Online STEM Courses via a Community of Inquiry and Decreasing Students' Cognitive Load

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This project aims to serve the national interest in high-quality undergraduate STEM education by designing and studying a pilot program to improve online discussion forums in STEM courses. The overall goal of the project is to improve students’ performance and persistence in online STEM courses, while simultaneously improving their attitudes toward STEM itself. To achieve this goal, the project focuses on introducing practices that reduce extraneous cognitive load, while also improving educators’ instructional and social presence, and students’ social and cognitive presence. The project will study a specific practice: a faculty-student learning community that uses discussion forums and other online components to minimize non-relevant technical complexity. The project intends to produce guidelines for creating a productive online learning community that does not require additional effort that is unrelated to the intended learning. The project will provide professional development to support instructors’ implementation of the guidelines. It is anticipated that the guidelines may be transferable to other online STEM courses. The projects’ data about student retention, persistence, and attitudes toward STEM will provide a base for additional research on online STEM learning. The goal of the project is to positively impact student persistence, performance, and perspectives in asynchronous online STEM courses. It expects to do to by supporting learning communities in ways that mitigate the impacts of extraneous cognitive load. To this end, the project will design and test a pilot program for infusing the components of the Community of Inquiry framework into asynchronous course discussions, including a best practices redesign of the discussion prompts, rubrics, and instructions by subject matter experts and instructional designers. The pilot program will use existing institutional structures to support the redesign and to provide faculty with the related professional development. In a mixed-methods research study, information will be collected about students’ academic success (course grades, discussion transcript analysis), persistence (withdrawal rate), and perspectives (surveys on STEM attitudes, cognitive load, and community of inquiry). These data will be complemented by results from focus group interviews. The project intends to generate a Community of Inquiry – Cognitive Load framework for asynchronous online STEM courses that supports student outcomes by promoting social, teaching, and cognitive presences via the Community of Inquiry, while mitigating cognitive load that is disconnected from disciplinary learning. The framework may be transferrable and scalable to other asynchronous online STEM courses. By identifying reasons for persistence and retention in online STEM courses, the project expects to lay the foundation for further research on interventions that improve student outcomes in online STEM courses. The NSF IUSE:EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Engaged Student Learning track, the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.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.