WIDER: EAGER: Documenting Instructional Practices in STEM Lecture Courses

虽然改善STEM教育有许多关键时刻，但本科教育的头两年肯定是其中之一。本科生第一次接触大学STEM课程通常是在大型讲座中进行的。这些课程经常被批评过于专注于提供信息，而太少培养科学的讨论、分析和反思。许多人会将人们认为的大型讲座课程的不足与STEM专业本科生头两年的高流失率联系在一起，特别是在代表性不足的少数族裔学生中。在UCI和其他地方，人们对改进讲座课程以促进更多的科学理解和提高对STEM学科的保留非常感兴趣。被认为特别有希望实现这一点的做法包括加强师生互动；加强同伴互动；更多地关注问题解决；更多的个性化学习机会；通过不同渠道和方式接收和交流信息的机会；以及更多基于数据的教学，即教职员工通过收集和权衡证据来评估自己教学的效果。在这个项目中，UCI教育学院和生物科学学院的教职员工团队将对UCI大型STEM入门讲座课程的当前教学实践进行系统研究。目标是：(A)制定衡量高等教育教学实践的综合矩阵；(B)建立基准数据；(C)对当前的STEM教学有一个概括性的认识；(D)促进各部门和学校之间的协同作用，以开展和分享系统的循证教学研究；以及(E)准备申请全面资助，以支持UCI加强循证STEM教育的进一步努力。这项拟议的研究将在UCI的五所大型学校中进行，这些学校在STEM中教授不同的学科：生物科学、工程、信息和计算机科学、物理科学和社会生态学。在这五所学校中，每一所学校都将确定大型初级课程，并在每所学校选择六个课程/科纳入研究范围。有目的的抽样将确保最广泛的教师参与，按教授水平、性别和背景进行。关于这些课程当前教学实践的数据将从三个来源收集--讲座、讨论部分和实验部分的现场观察和录像观察；对课程讲师的采访；以及对课程教学大纲和其他材料的审查--使用旨在捕捉上述基于证据的和有希望的实践的相对存在或不存在的类比。数据分析将重点放在这三个来源之间的三角测量，以提供一个广泛和彻底的概述，在多大程度上以证据为基础的教学实践在UCI的STEM讲座中得到应用。

Though there are many critical junctures for improving STEM education, the first two years of undergraduate education are certainly among them. Undergraduates' first experience with university STEM courses typically takes place in large lecture courses. These courses are often criticized for focusing too much on providing information and too little on fostering scientific discussion, analysis, and reflection. Many would tie perceived inadequacies of large lecture courses with the high attrition rate that takes place in STEM majors in the first two years of undergraduate study, especially among underrepresented minority students. At UCI and elsewhere, there is a great deal of interest in improving lecture courses to foster greater scientific understanding and improve retention in the STEM disciplines. Practices that are considered particularly promising for accomplishing this include enhanced faculty-student interaction; enhanced peer interaction; greater attention to problem-solving; more opportunities for personalized learning; opportunities to receive and communicate information across diverse channels and modalities; and more data-based instruction, in which faculty evaluate the effects of their own teaching by gathering and weighing evidence. In this project a team of UCI faculty members in the School of Education and the School of Biological Sciences will carry out a systematic study of current instructional practice in large introductory STEM lecture courses at UCI. The goals are to (a) develop a comprehensive matrix for measuring instructional practices in higher education; (b) establish baseline data; (c) obtain a synoptic view of current STEM instruction; (d) promote synergy across departments and schools to conduct and share systematic evidence-based instructional research; and (e) prepare to apply for full-scale funding to support further efforts at strengthening evidence-based STEM education at UCI. The proposed study will take place among five large UCI schools that teach various disciplines within STEM: Biological Sciences, Engineering, Information and Computer Sciences, Physical Sciences, and Social Ecology. In each of these five schools, large introductory lower-division courses will be identified and six course/sections in each school will be selected for inclusion in the study. Purposeful sampling will ensure the broadest range of faculty participation, by professorial level, gender, and background. Data on current instructional practices in those classes will be gathered from three sources--live and video-taped observations of lectures, discussion sections, and lab sections; interviews with course instructors; and review of course syllabi and other materials--using rubrics that are designed to capture the relative presence or absence of the evidence-based and promising practices described above. Data analysis will focus on triangulation among these three sources to provide a broad and thorough overview of the extent to which evidence-based instructional practices are deployed in STEM lecture courses at UCI.