DBER Archive

Identifying and assessing multiple academic factors that contribute to a student's decisions ot leave CU Boulder.
At CU Boulder, approximately 15% of an entering fall term freshman cohort are not enrolled the next fall term. During this session we'll look at percent DFW grades for undergraduate courses as a possible factor for students leaving the institutions. We'll also iterate on other possible academic factors that are contributing to undergraduates leaving the institution. Your suggestions on other possible academic factors will serve discussion topics for future DBER sessions.

Kirk Ambrose, the Founding Faculty Director for the Teaching and Learning Center will be joining DBER on Monday, February 25. This will give us a chance to share our individual projects and commitments to student learning, faculty development, and how these are manifest in our content areas. This will be an excellent opportunity to ask any questions about the future of the Teaching and Learning Center and how we can participate.

Undergraduate research has been shown to be a high impact practice, however getting students involved in research isn't always easy. In this talk, I will discuss how I use whole class and group research projects in upperdivision plant courses to drive independent research questions and recruit undergraduate students to explore these questions outside of the classroom. I will also discuss how student feedback and independent research informs future course projects.

Scientific teaching involves enacting scientific practices in a manner enabling data-driven revision of curricula and teaching strategies. As with the pursuit of science for making sense of the world, scientific teaching begins with potentially falsifiable claims. When we teach, we enact a simple claim that what we do—how we teach and what we teach—leads to student learning and improves their knowledge and understanding of the world. This is a potentially falsifiable claim because we can test whether learning happens. If educators do not frame teaching in a scientific framework, the approach become a belief system and we believe, rather than have evidence, that teaching is effective. We believe we are good educators, and that our students become better, more critical, and more capable thinkers as a consequence of enacting particular educational practices. Yet, because each of us has a stake in our own teaching, confirmation bias is inevitable, and we end up fooling ourselves that our teaching is effective. Like all good science, enacting scientific teaching requires we make the process explicit and potentially repeatable. The first step is elucidation of what you want to know. Arguably, the key outcome variable is how much learning happens, usually described as learning gain. What variables predict learning? And what are the relevant parameters governing how much learning happens? At the end of the day the focus is how much students learned and why some students may have learned more or less than others. In this session we will focus on simple and productive approaches towards collecting objective evidence about teaching effectiveness.

A number of studies have demonstrated positive outcomes of the Learning Assistant (LA) program on student learning, retention, and graduation rates, yet much remains unknown about the mechanisms that lead to these outcomes. We observed LAs in action and interviewed students about their interactions with LAs and TAs. We identified vast differences in the ways students viewed LAs and TAs as well as three critical elements that LAs bring to their interactions with students. First, LAs contribute valuable course, content, and institutional knowledge. Second, LAs bring an oft-missing relational component into the classroom, and finally, LAs demonstrate pedagogical practices when working with students. These findings also lead to inferences about how LAs facilitate both academic and social integration for students on campus. These findings and inferences will be discussed.

We will describe two initiatives to support first-year engineering students and assessment data related to these initiatives. In GEEN1400, First-Year Engineering Projects, students collaborate within teams of 5 on a 4-week introductory project before progressing to an 11-week main project that is presented at a celebratory public Design Expo at the end of the semester. About 60% of all engineering students take GEEN1400, and it has been offered in this basic format for over 20 years supported by evidence that taking the course in the first year improves student retention in engineering. Beginning in Fall 2017, we revamped the course to include a greater focus on individual and team growth rather than the physical projects/products presented at the Design Expo. Starting in Fall 2018 we formalized this Team Growth concept across all course activities and conducted more formal assessment of Individual and Team Growth outcomes, supported by an award from TRESTLE.

 

Engineering Math (GEEN3830) is a one-semester course that covers topics from Pre-Calc, Calc 1, 2, and Differential Equations through hands-on laboratory exercises and engineering applications – a math class where every problem has units and authentic engineering context. The curriculum for the course was initially created by engineers at Wright State University, where the course is required for all engineering students and has been shown to improve persistence through the required undergraduate math sequence and ultimately engineering degrees. Here at CU, we piloted Engineering Math in Fall 2017 with 22 students, growing to 102 students in Fall 2018. We will discuss our early assessment data and implementation challenges as we are currently deciding how we can tailor the course from both administrative and instructional perspectives to make Fall 2019 the best yet.

The question of innovation in design studies education is an ongoing one. Content is one area commonly addressed, but few studies consider the role of the administrative and learning infrastructure that guides the teaching of content and skills to students. Beginning with this observation, this study shares the results of a three year examination of a program of Peer Leadership at the University of Colorado in Boulder. "Peer Leaders" are advanced undergraduates in the CU Environmental Design program who lead recitation sections and support content development for fellow undergraduates in the freshman course, Introduction to Environmental Design Theory. A key innovation of this model is the use of community of practice-based, peer-to-peer learning alongside a vertical integration of course faculty, peer leaders, and students. To examine the Peer Leadership program, this study draws upon a novel framework drawing the learning sciences together with theories from the planning and systems thinking disciplines. Data for the case draws upon a mixed-methods approach including interviews, surveys, and action research memos gathered across six semesters. Results point to the transformative potential latent within peer-to-peer learning models. Specifically, the underlying feedback loops along this model's vertical chain of communication appear to have allowed for valuable shifts in student outcomes when compared with typical course leadership formats. Overall, this study aims to advance applied theories of educational administration and to serve as a practical example informing the development of related programs towards the goals of transformative learning and educational innovation.

The SEI lasted almost 10 years here at CU, from 2006-2014, and at our sister institution U. British Columbia. The SEI has influenced the teaching of 120 courses at UBC and 50 at CU, and has sparked numerous “copycat” programs which use the embedded expert model espoused by the SEI: Hiring postdocs or instructors into departments to partner directly with faculty on making changes to their courses. Carl Wieman wrote a book in 2017, “Improving how Universities Teach Science”, documenting what happened in the SEI. However, myself and the associate director at UBC (Warren Code) often find ourselves trying to advise others using the model, without a clear set of guiding materials.

This led us to write the SEI Handbook to document the lessons learned for campus leaders, departmental leaders, and the embedded experts who lead change within departments. Read or download the SEI Handbook for free online at https://pressbooks.bccampus.ca/seihandbook/. Printed copies are also available on Amazon.com.

Why should you come to this DBER? If you are leading a change initiative, we have many transportable “lessons learned” for how to bring adequate attention to the initiative and engage faculty. If you are an instructor or faculty member working with department faculty on course modifications, we have lessons for you. And more broadly, I will share some of the impacts the SEI has had on the national landscape.

The first talk will be given by Becca Ciancanelli, SASC STEM coordinator, and Kathryn Plath, General Chemistry Instructor. We initiated this project in Fall 2017- administering a pre/post survey on metacognition along with an intervention workshop after the first exam. Participants in this project included all students enrolled in SASC small lecture courses (math, chemistry, biology and economics) as well as students enrolled in large lecture sections of CHEM 1113 (General Chemistry), CHEM 1400 (General Chemistry for majors) and CHEM 1011 (Environmental Chemistry). This year, we altered the intervention (from a one-time workshop to several in-class student reflections) and we used a validated survey (MCAI). We are hoping to get feedback from the community about how to approach the results from this year and get ideas about how to alter the research project for the third year.

The second talk will be given by Sam Flaxman, EBIO Faculty and General Biology Coordinator. Inspired by the work of researchers like Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire & Dr. Carol Dweck on metacognition and mindset, I attempted to design a metacognitive intervention for students who were performing poorly in my introductory biology class. My challenges for myself were to (1) target students in need of change and (2) do this in a way that was scalable for one person (me) to implement in a class of over 600 students. I'll discuss the ways I attempted to roll this out, the materials I created, and hope to get ideas about how to make this more effective in the future.

We investigate students’ sense of ownership of multiweek final projects in an upper-division optics lab course. Using a multiple case study approach, we describe three student projects in detail. Within-case analyses focused on identifying key issues in each project, and constructing chronological descriptions of those events. Cross-case analysis focused on identifying emergent themes with respect to five dimensions of project ownership: student agency, instructor mentorship, peer collaboration, interest and value, and affective responses. Our within- and cross-case analyses yielded three major findings. First, coupling division of labor with collective brainstorming can help balance student agency, instructor mentorship, and peer collaboration. Second, students’ interest in the project and perceptions of its value can increase over time; initial student interest in the project topic is not a necessary condition for student ownership of the project. Third, student ownership is characterized by a wide range of emotions that fluctuate as students alternate between extended periods of struggle and moments of success while working on their projects.

Abstract: The Partnerships for Informal Science Education in the Community, is a program that creates long-term, sustained partnerships with local community members in an effort to provide students, largely those from under-represented minorities, opportunities to explore science and expand their scientific horizons while developing STEM skills and having fun. Following the internationally successful Fifth Dimension model for after-school programs, PISEC has been designed since its inception to provide benefits not only to students but to volunteers and even the institutions that support PISEC. Ongoing scholarly research into the program has indeed demonstrated and catalogued these benefits, and in this talk we will discuss these findings, current PISEC research directions, as well as the program itself and its implementation.

Kind of talk: Other, I think? PISEC is an ongoing project and I think what we're envisioning is more of an overview with a series of research vignettes than a discussion on a specific research project.. Noah can correct/elaborate if needed.

Format of talk: Fully interactive -- no need to get through certain slides before questions, and we might include short hands-on demonstrations of how PISEC engages students.

What I hope to get out of my talk: I can't speak for Noah but personally I think it will just be useful to share our research in this setting. I don't know that we need specific help but just presenting to the local DBER community I think will be useful. I also think getting the community's feedback on any possible community partnership opportunities for PISEC will be useful.

The introduction of the Internet and a myriad of digital devices has brought about shifts in the way we acquire, process, and interact with information in the world. Digital materials such as videotaped lectures, textbooks, and online coursework are becoming commonplace at even the highest levels of education. Although the omnipresence of these newer technologies is apparent, the effects of these technologies on basic human cognition are much less obvious. In this talk, I will discuss some of the early but consistent findings that implicate a cognitive system beginning to adapt to the permanence of information in the digital age. Additionally, I will present results from two studies exploring the effect that different mediums of information presentation (e.g., print vs. digital) have on depth-of-processing and memory. I hope to facilitate a discussion of some of the far-reaching implications of these findings on everyday information processing, particularly touching on implications for higher education. In the final 10-15 minutes of the talk, I will shift gears to provide an update on the VIP (classroom observation) service offered through ASSETT. We’ll look at some new ways of visualizing the classroom experience and I’ll field any questions about the service.

We are studying how students independently solve complex genetics problems through written documentation of their problem-solving processes. We analyze their answers for correctness, use of reasoning, and other cognitive and metacognitive processes. We also measure whether giving students content “hints” improves their ability to solve similar problems or changes their problem-solving process. We are particularly interested in whether certain processes correlate with correct answers, and whether the sequence of thinking a student engages in influences their problem-solving ability. Ideally, this work will lead to an understanding of how to better help students become life-long problem-solvers.

The Virtual Professional Development for Informal Science Educators (PDISE) project is a collaboration between a science education researcher and a local summer camp STEM program to increase opportunities for informal STEM educators to work together in a community of practice-like environment to strengthen high-quality teaching practices. Using a boundary crossing framework, instructors were purposively recruited based on varied professional backgrounds outside the context of their work with this program. Instructors met in five online meetings facilitated by the science education researcher, prior to the start of summer camps. Findings indicate that while participants did share prior professional experiences during boundary crossing episodes, they more frequently drew on prior or concurrent teaching experiences than on those from other professional backgrounds. During the course of the meetings and in subsequent interactions between members of this nascent community, boundary crossing episodes proved to be fertile sites of cooperation between instructors, which resulted in engagement in high-quality informal STEM teaching practices during summer camps.

I will describe seminars which were implemented this year for the purpose of supporting Learning Assistants in their roles as tutors in the Math Academic Resource Center, as well as my research study designed to better understand the experiences and sense of belonging of the students enrolled in the Precalculus through Calculus 2 courses to which these Learning Assistants are assigned in the classroom context.

Through the language they use, instructors create classroom environments that have the potential to impact learning by affecting student motivation, resistance, belonging, and self-efficacy. Effective learning environments require instructor leadership in communicating in dynamic ways, motivating high-quality student work, building trust, and embracing the teaching and learning process. However, despite the critical importance of instructor language to the student experience, little research has investigated what instructors are saying in undergraduate classrooms. We systematically investigated instructor language that was not directly relate to content and defined this as Instructor Talk. Using a grounded theory approach, we have identified five robust categories of Instructor Talk that can characterize ~90% of non-content language found in over 60 courses: 1) Building Instructor/Student Relationships, 2) Establishing Classroom Culture, 3) Explaining Pedagogical Choices, 4) Sharing Personal Experience, and 5) Unmasking Science. The remaining ~10% of instances of Instructor Talk in these settings were categorized as non-productive or potentially discouraging in nature. Attention to Instructor Talk in undergraduate classrooms may be key for instructors to create inclusive learning environments. (1-1.5 hour)

There is growing body of work from the learning sciences providing us with insights into how people learn; and from Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) we know what discipline-specific difficulties students face. However, it is quite surprising that relatively little of this understanding has made its way into the design of science and engineering curricula offered at most colleges and universities. This presentation will focus on the need for evidence-based curriculum reform, the research findings that can guide such reforms, and how we might assess the results of such transformation efforts. An approach to systemic reform that focuses on core ideas, scientific practices and cross-cutting concepts, will be discussed. An example of such a curriculum reform effort “Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything”, will be presented, along with the evidence to support such transformations.

Design-based learning practices (DBL) involve students in solving ill-defined, complex, and open-ended problems that require ideation. During ideation, students are tasked with generating a wide variety of innovative ideas (divergent thinking) in order to expand and restructure the problem to find creative solutions. Although innovative design and divergent thinking is required in many biological careers, current biology classrooms rarely focus on creative problem solving. Instead, instructors almost always ask students to converge on a single correct answer, failing to train students in idea-generation skills. This preliminary study incorporates a new bio-inspired design discipline, biomimicry, in an undergraduate Fall 2017 Evolution course. We investigate if engagement in DBL can increase students' ability to generate 1) many ideas (fluency), 2) a diversity of ideas (flexibility), and 3) unique ideas (originality) - to think divergently - in order to improve their creativity in addressing biology-related design challenges.

Several DBER attendees have made suggestions about the format, goals, and structure of our DBER weekly sessions. As you know, we have experimented with various structures throughout the 18 years we have run DBER. As our community changes, we would like to revisit our goals. We will begin with a brief history of DBER at CU Boulder and will spend a majority of the time discussing our plans for the upcoming year. Please come prepared to share your thoughts about DBER with the goal of arriving at a structure for next year.

Kind of talk - Relatively Complete: I have data to present;  ready for substantive critique
 
Format of talk – Hybrid: I need to get through a certain number of slides, which I will define at the beginning of my talk, then I’m ready to take lots of questions.
 
What I hope to get out of my talk: This talk aligns with a paper that my co-author will present at the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) conference in June. I want to identify areas where there is inconsistency or confusion in what I am presenting. The paper will be presented to a division within ASEE that focuses on engineering leadership development.

Kind of talk: Other: I want to share my experience engaging in developing a new introductory chemistry course for chemistry and biochemistry majors (Foundations of Chemistry). The course will touch on my goals, the course format, motivation behind curriculum development, efforts to use evidence-based practices, and attempts to build a sense of community and belonging among majors.

Format of talk: Fully interactive: please interrupt me at any time!

What I hope to get out of my talk: I would love to share my experience and get feedback from the community. To be crystal clear - I didn't carry out a DBER study! I developed a new class. But I learned a lot along the way that might be valuable to others in the community. I also suspect that I could learn a lot from the community about how to continue to evolve this course and extend what we have learned to additional courses.

Kind: We will be presenting on the Faculty Online Learning Community Project, which I would categorize as Relatively Complete. The project itself has a couple more years to go, but I will be presenting a full theoretical model and some of the data we have already collected.
Format: We would like a Presentation format, (Interruptions only for clarification questions; please let me speak for ~30 minutes; then I will be happy to answer questions.).
Goal: We welcome any constructive feedback from the group on our model, that data we have collected, and future directions (as we still have more time on the project).

Kind of talk: Exploratory (project in early stages but already in progress, looking for input and constructive criticism, but not a finished project)
Format: Hybrid. We will have dedicated time for clarification questions during the talk. Substantive comments and questions should be saved until the end.
What we hope to get out of our talk: We hope for this to be the start of a broader conversation about institutional and cultural change. Given that we are still in the early stages of the project, we welcome your constructive feedback on the DAT model. For example, what do you think about providing explicit facilitation and norming for DAT participants? Do the connections between our goals, program design, and research activities feel logical?

Kind of Talk: Relatively complete, reporting on a collection of three published papers, feedback always welcome
Format: Fully interactive
What I hope to get out of it: Conversation about reforms so that we can situate our own work in the broader context of history

Since the 1880s, physics education reformers have been calling for increased engagement by students in the inductive method (called “inquiry” or a “scientific practice” in more recent times). This theme was repeatedly “rediscovered” in each era, as the intense and passionate debates of previous times were largely forgotten, overlooked, or misinterpreted. I will describe differences in how physics reform movements (such as the project method, the inductive method, and physics for everyday life) have been interpreted by science education reformers with different educational backgrounds and commitments. By highlighting debates originating from diverse objectives, I conjecture that these differences have served to impede educational change and continue to do so today. I will also discuss how certain perspectives held by well-meaning scholars may serve to exclude, rather than include, students from physics and other sciences.

To register for this event, please complete the registration form at: http://bit.ly/CSLRegistration2017

Many instructors are aware that their students often engage in suboptimal study behaviors, such as by passively re-reading their notes and textbook. These behaviors are associated with weaker memory and understanding than would be received through the use of practice testing. The mnemonic benefits of practice testing over restudying are well established and are referred to as the "testing effect". We have designed an online educational intervention that exposes students to the superior memory outcomes resulting from self-testing. The purpose of this intervention is to reduce the disconnect between study strategies that psychological research demonstrates to be most effective for long-term memory and those that students normally put to use. We are currently attempting to validate the effectiveness of this intervention in large samples of students across a variety of educational contexts. We hope that this presentation encourages you to offer this intervention experience to students who might benefit from the educational benefits of self-testing.

There have been many calls to improve science education, in terms of both inclusion and outcomes, most recently through advocacy of various pedagogical strategies.  Working with Melanie Cooper (Michigan State University), we have advocated a complementary approach, focussed on the development of more coherent content in chemistry (CLUE) and molecular biology (biofundamentals).  While demonstrably effective at the course level, there have been relatively few studies (or tools) to evaluate how such strategies help students to develop an increasingly sophisticated working understanding of disciplinary topics and skills as they progress through a curriculum. To this end we are developing what we term “progressive assessment questions” (PAQs), deliverable either on paper or through our beSocratic assessment system. PAQs are designed to be answerable at various levels of conceptual sophistication at various points within a degree program. I will describe some approaches to the development of PAQs relevant to molecular biology and other disciplines, with the goal of initiating a discussion as to what counts as a successful curriculum in terms of students’ evolving, and increasingly nuanced, understanding.

Kind: This is a brand new project and we have not begun collecting data.

Format: Please interrupt with questions and constructive suggestions, keeping in mind that I am most interested in your thoughts on participant selection and recruitment and methodology near the end of my talk.

Goal: I'm interested in your input on our general methodology and suggestions for participant recruitment

The Lens on Climate Change (LOCC) is an informal science education program for middle and high school students, funded by the National Science Foundation. It provides participating students with the opportunity to document the effects of climatic and environmental changes on their lives and in their communities and the opportunity to communicate about those issues through the production of a short film. Our research on the impacts of LOCC involves a mixed methods approach. However, this talk focuses on the qualitative case studies we have conducted to take a closer look at how the program impacts students’ knowledge and perceptions about climate change, both in general and in connection with their local communities.

This week's DBER will be focused on the Foundations of Excellence (FoE) effort and Academic Futures. Many of us are involved in committees, have attended sessions related to these efforts and/or have contributed white papers to forward the conversation. During this guided discussion, attendees will share their experiences with these efforts, investigate materials produced so far, determine what is missing, and generate a response from the DBER community to be included in these efforts.

We have used the Colorado Learning Attitudes about Science Survey (CLASS) to investigate the impact of the Student Academic Success Center’s physics co-seminar on physics 1110 students’ beliefs about science. I will introduce the physics co-seminar for context, and then discuss the pre- and post-instruction CLASS scores for my students, with comparison to the scores of physics 1110 students not enrolled in the co-seminar. Students taking the co-seminar showed net favorable shifts on several CLASS categories, in contrast with the control group. I will discuss a connection between specific components of the co-seminar pedagogy and the CLASS shifts observed.

I have performed a survey study investigating ability uncertainty and social belonging in introductory chemistry. This is the first broad survey of students in STEM to determine if LGBTQ+ students are underrepresented. I will provide an update on the analysis of the survey data. Briefly, I find that LGBTQ+ students are not underrepresented compared to the university general population and account for ~10% of the students enrolled in General Chemistry I. I find no statistically significant differences between any group of students based on gender or sexuality. However, the strong correlation of grade with ability uncertainty may be confounding my ability to measure differences.

A great deal of intellectual effort has been devoted to effective educational assessment, in part because pedagogical transformation should always start with the clear articulation of measurable goals, along with methods of assessment. Yet, across the vast majority of university classrooms, course grades and one-time, post-hoc, student responses to subjective questions are the only two sources of assessment data. Much of the barrier to effective assessment in the real world involves efficiency - most university educators' schedules are already too strained to carve out time for assessment and evaluation. In this talk I'll describe assessment approaches I've been exploring that do not demand additional time and/or effort on the part of the instructor.

The Learning About STEM Student Outcomes (LASSO) System allows instructors to measure and analyze learning outcomes with the click of a button. The system administers the assessment (and associated consent forms) to students along with a short survey that will allow for disaggregation and analysis of the data. Instructors can download a spreadsheet with their courses results and they can also download analyzed results and graphs showing their learning gains and effect sizes. There are 11 assessments that have undergone application, evaluation, and validation in Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry, Math, and Physics. Participants will be introduced to the system and guided through the process of signing up their courses. We will also present some findings from studies done with increasing national data set.

Can students transfer in-class group practices to individual assessment opportunities that require reasoning and logic? To find out, we have begun to study how students independently solve complex problems on genetics. We have conducted think-aloud interviews to capture the processes students use in problem solving, as well as performance data from online administration of the same problems. I will discuss both our strategy for measuring whether students improve at problem solving with practice, and for characterizing whether certain problem solving steps or strategies correlate with correct vs. incorrect answers. This work is preliminary, and I welcome your feedback throughout the presentation.

We have designed a new upper-division discovery-based laboratory course to increase some aspects of scientific and experimental literacy by providing "authentic scientific experiences" to engage students and increase their understanding of the process of science, core concepts in Molecular and Developmental Biology, experimental design and controls and get them to value science and its contributions to society.

I will begin with summarizing our discussion from my previous DBER presentation, about what it means to be scientifically literate. I will then move on to describe our approach to increase and assess scientific literacy, focusing initially on my observations of students' failure to retrieve or apply their content knowledge, failure to correctly justify their answers and their struggle to see the forest for the trees.

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We can no longer afford to measure teaching by reviewing results from the faculty course questionnaire and an occasional peer observation. Good teachers—like experts in any endeavor—need more frequent input and feedback on their performance, time to reflect on it, and plans for improving their teaching. Arts and Sciences Support for Education Through Technology (ASSETT) has launched the Visualization of Instructional Practices (VIP) service to provide teachers with a method of input and feedback on their teaching. This service lets teachers choose a descriptive protocol that fits their situation. Examples include the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS), or the Observation Protocol for Learning Environments (OPLE). Students are then dispatched to their classrooms and use that protocol to record what they observe happening in the class. After several observations are conducted, the data are visualized and shared with the teachers. Consultants are available to meet with teachers to give them ideas for interpreting the results. In this presentation, we will help participants become familiar with the process we use in our VIP service. We will start by guiding participants in collecting COPUS observation data from a video clip of a teacher, and then we will visualize the data. We will facilitate a discussion on questions related to variability in observational data, limitations to consider, and useful applications. We will discuss differences between methods of providing feedback on teaching. We will also share about the ASSETT VIP service and how you can use it to gain formative input on your teaching practice.

Precalculus (MATH-1150) will become the first course in CU’s STEM-major sequence starting Fall 2017, as College Algebra and Trigonometry will no longer be taught after Spring 2017. Data from the last ten years of instruction show that Precalculus has a DFW rate of a 31%, which designates it as a high-risk course. Since Precalculus is becoming the gateway course for many STEM majors, with yearly enrollments exceeding 700 students, the Math Department faculty decided to be proactive and support its students by implementing a supplemental course, MATH-1151. The 1-credit course was created in collaboration with the Student Academic Success Center and is designed with metacognitive activities built upon the Banks' Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education. At this presentation, I will share the course’s goals, structure, teaching pedagogy, results, and implications for future courses on campus.

In many of our educational innovations, we have some assumptions about how certain actions (say, an after-school program, or incorporation of learning assistants into a course) will result in the desired change or outcome (e.g., increased learning).  However, we often fail to explicitly articulate why our chosen strategies will achieve the change that we want.  This can be done through a “Theory of Change,” which lays bare the assumptions and guiding principles of an intervention.  In today’s working meeting we will discuss what a “Theory of Change” is, why it’s important for programs (and to the NSF!).   We will be joined virtually by Mark Connolly of the Wisconsin Center for Education Research, who will place the idea of Theory of Change in the broader context, and talk about some examples from analysis of recent NSF awards.  I will talk about how I have used Theory of Change to develop evaluation for a national teacher education program.  Then, we’ll give you some practicing in articulating your own Theory of Change.

See attached for a white paper on Theory of Change by Mark Connolly and (our own) Elaine Seymour.

Three decades of research in cognitive development and science education has revealed that students enter the science classroom with rich, though generally inaccurate, theories of everyday phenomena that often interfere with learning. I will present research suggesting that these “intuitive” theories are never truly replaced by scientific theories but rather coexist with them, shaping the kinds of inferences we make, the kinds of explanations we endorse, and the kinds of information we accept as true. While adults with extensive science education are typically able to discriminate between scientific and non-scientific claims, they are slower to make those discriminations for claims that are inconsistent with their intuitive theories, and they justify the endorsement of scientific claims by appealing to intuition and authority rather than theory and evidence. Our understanding of science may thus be constrained by patterns of reasoning that emerge in childhood but persist long thereafter.

There is a process underway to revise the FCQ tool; the pilot will run again in the spring...do we want to play a role in what happens? Do we want a better tool? We have some data that can serve as a launch pad for a productive discussion about the why, how and what of an authentic FCQ tool.

We often associate learning labs with the sciences or with languages.  This talk will introduce CU’s Shakespeare CoLab:  a unique digital learning environment connected to Shakespeare for Non-majors (taken by your students!), our new Applied Shakespeare Certificate program, and the Colorado Shakespeare Festival.  
 
Now we’d like to explore how your unit might partner with us to create a campus-wide, thoroughly interdisciplinary project.  

Research shows that undergraduate student participation in authentic research opportunities (ARO) enhances persistence in STEM fields by strengthening student perceptions of themselves as scientists. Longitudinal studies show that students who participated in an ARO, including members of underrepresented groups, were 14-17% more likely to persist in STEM fields on to graduate school compared with their colleagues who did not. However, these same studies pointed out that, despite the benefits of undergraduate research, the designs of many such research programs have shortcomings that can inhibit wider student participation or even reduce student persistence in the sciences.

 

A unique ARO design is currently being piloted within the Department of Geological Sciences that combines the benefits of the faculty-student mentoring and apprenticeship characteristics of an Undergraduate Research Experience with the peer mentoring and guided literature discussion of a Course Undergraduate Research Experience as a collaborative multi-semester undergraduate research community. Undergraduate students participating in the ARO will: 1) conduct independent but interrelated research projects under a large-scale question and  2) participate in a 1-credit research seminar that will place each student’s project into a broader scientific context by exploring the scientific literature and that will promote each student’s role as a peer mentor and collaborator in answering a larger research question.  Students are recruited who are at different stages of their career so that the younger students can benefit not only from faculty mentoring, but can also learn from their undergraduate ‘elders’.   We will discuss the currently model used in this effort and the preliminary results and student attitudes about the project.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are spreading and being scaled to accommodate more students across the nation. As they expand and gain recognition, more disciplines are seeking to adopt this innovation and make it their own. Thus far, much of the work to define CUREs and explore CURE design has been spearheaded by biologists and chemists who have applied CUREs to their disciplines. For example, a group that defined what they see as five essential CURE elements consisted primarily of researchers from chemistry and biology. Yet, the “essential elements” of research-based experiences that result in desired outcomes for undergraduates may vary by discipline, or even by sub-discipline, since the research goals of each discipline vary. 

I would like to engage the DBER community in a discussion of if and how the essential elements of research-based courses might vary by discipline. For example, during DBER I would like us to explore if a Physics CURE should seek to incorporate different elements than a Biology CURE. I hope that we can have a lively discussion of how research in our disciplines varies and what experiences and outcomes might result from involving students in course-based research in different disciplines. 

We used a combination of observation, network analysis, and two-stage exams to estimate gains in a difficult to assess learning goal: "productively collaborate towards common goals". There will be a brief description of the context, a little bit about the course (Intro to Quantitative Thinking EBIO 1010, also known as IQUIT), a mock two stage exam (with two questions), and a march through some results for the purpose of stimulating discussion about meaning and value. The work was funded by a CSL Chancellor's fellowship.

The ability to apply scientific thinking is essential to navigate the world effectively and decipher between valid and invalid claims (such as the false link between vaccines and autism). Many topics are controversial, in part, due to strong beliefs based on visceral emotional reactions. When closely held viewpoints are challenged, rather than relying on scientific evidence, analytical thinking may be overridden in favor for more intuitive forms of thinking such as emotional, theistic, and pseudoscientific thinking.

In an effort to bring awareness to these thinking patterns and encourage engagement with scientific thinking, we developed a lesson to have students identify and evaluate their own thinking, and analytically compare their thinking with that of the general population about acceptance of evolution (in general, and specifically about humans).

We will discuss the lesson and explore other ways in which student scientific literacy and metacognitive ability can be strengthened in light of common pitfalls in thinking (including motivated reasoning).