Collaborative Research: Transforming Institutions Through STEM Equity Learning Communities

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This project aims to serve the national interest by improving STEM education outcomes using a department-level approach to address systemic inequities that create barriers to student success. Introductory STEM courses consistently reproduce inequities for historically marginalized students. However, it is common among those involved in STEM education, including faculty, administrators, and even students themselves, to view these inequities as resulting from student deficits. This “blame-the-victim” mindset creates a significant barrier for STEM education reform as attempts to address inequities often focus on “fixing” the students, rather than on creating systemic change in courses and departments. This project will test a department-oriented approach for changing the student-deficit mindsets present in faculty, administrators, and undergraduate students. By guiding participants in recognizing the structural role that courses and departments play in student success, and documenting the process in the form of a guide, this project will allow new and different institutions to adapt this field-tested approach for their local contexts, driving dialogue in STEM departments on approaches for examining student academic outcomes through an equity lens. Leveraging the existing relationships and past work of the multi-institutional Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses (SEISMIC) collaboration, this project plans to develop and share a standard menu of equity measures that should provide a benchmark for universities seeking to measure equity in their courses and departments. Use of this standard menu of measurements should allow community colleges, public research universities, tribal colleges, private universities, and more to learn from each other on institutional policies that promote equity in STEM classrooms, promoting greater partnerships between these traditionally siloed types of institutions. Development of a public monthly talk series on this project hopes to make STEM reform efforts more accessible and inspire more people in higher education to consider their own mindsets on student success, to learn how to talk about and represent course inequities in equity-minded ways, and to recognize these deficit mindsets as part of the greater structural problems in the U.S. stemming from institutional racism. The overall objective of this proposal is to establish STEM Equity Learning Communities (SELCs) in universities across the U.S. that will foster impactful approaches for engaging faculty, department leaders, and undergraduate students in equity-minded discussions of their STEM courses. There are four expected outcomes for this two-year project: (1) A guide for the creation and effective operation of data-centric SELCs that can be adapted for different institutional contexts; (2) Development and implementation of an array of intersectional course equity measures that can be used by many institutions to place their own equity challenges in a national context; (3) Equity-minded action plans for peer universities across the U.S. to address systemic inequities in introductory STEM courses; and (4) Field-tested instruments for measuring mindsets on student success. Major project activities include creating a SELC on each participating SEISMIC campus, developing and using survey and interview protocols to study the experiences of SELC members, establishing shared classroom equity measures using institutional data, engaging participants with equity data through a Summer Institute, local SELC meetings, cross-campus inter-SELC meetings, and a public talk series. Finally, each SELC will be guided to develop an action plan and presentation for their local campus leadership to initiate reform in their introductory STEM courses. The project hopes to generate knowledge on how well and in what context SELCs can develop equity-mindedness in faculty, department leaders, and undergraduate students across ten large, public, R1 universities and can empower them to promote this mindset in their departments. The project should also enable future research on the nuances of equity measures most effective for motivating structural change and generating positive impact on introductory STEM courses. 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.