This project is: improving student success rates in gateway and next in progression courses through development of linked courses based on common themed subject topics; supporting student academic career development, experiential learning and subject mastery skills through specific activities; engaging faculty through a wide range of professional development incentives including course release time and support to produce and sustain integrated content and to develop pedagogical shifts in course delivery; institutionalizing key components to ensure that the new approaches and successful practices developed are sustained beyond project completion; evaluating the effect of the introduced activities and practices on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students' recruitment, retention, academic progress, and graduation rates; and broadly disseminating the results of this effort to other universities nationally.
Intellectual Merit: Creative Scientific Inquiry is an innovative, linked courses approach to improving the teaching and learning of science for students who have expressed interest in STEM majors. This project advances the STEM field by providing a model that combines linked courses, faculty professional development, and student support services to significantly increase the number of students who major in STEM.
Broader Impact: Substantial efforts are being made to recruit and retain women and minorities in STEM majors. Developing outcomes include changes in students' content knowledge, problem solving ability, and attitudes toward the sciences, which encompass a more theme-linked approach. Participating faculty are: disseminating results to the scientific communities; distributing project/seminar materials for the courses through workshops; and exchanging ideas and data via a web site and computer conferencing capabilities linked through Eastern Michigan University's home page.
