The Association of American Universities (AAU) has launched a five-year initiative with the overall goal of influencing the culture of STEM departments at AAU universities so that they will use sustainable, student-centered, evidence-based, active learning pedagogy in their classes, particularly at the freshman and sophomore levels. Reform of undergraduate STEM education has focused until now on change at the level of faculty and student activity or student support services, with much less attention to cultural change at the institutional level. The crucial first step in the AAU initiative, supported by this grant, is to gather baseline data to identify institutional objectives in improving STEM education, and articulate the problems these objectives seek to address.
Specifically, this project is focusing on metrics for assessing institutional support of evidence-based instruction for those institutions making a public commitment to be part of a cultural shift to evidence-based instruction as a new norm. Metrics are needed that can be used both to assess institutional culture with respect to evidence-based teaching, and to measure the impact of actions taken to increase the extent of use of evidence-based teaching. The centerpiece of the AAU initiative is developing a framework to foster institutional commitment to effective STEM teaching and learning practices. This framework is being informed by a set of demonstration projects at AAU universities. These demonstration projects are being selected based on their commitment to STEM pedagogical reform and to represent the variety of challenges confronting universities in improving STEM undergraduate education. The project is assessing their effectiveness at reform efforts, which is providing benchmarks by which the success of reforms can be judged.
Project activities will result in a more complete documentation of the status of current efforts to document pedagogy in undergraduate STEM courses and a template for baseline data collection for demonstration sites: both to guide their own projects and to share results with other institutions.
