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.
