The WCER-Based NSF-Funded National Endeavor Project

http://mobilizingstem.wceruw.org/ Project Synopsis

This project, funded by the National Science Foundation, seeks to build on past and current improvement efforts in postsecondary science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education, in the context of pressing global environmental and social problems. Our vision is of teachers and learners at all levels who are excited, actively engaged, motivated, and challenged by complex, interdisciplinary issues that involve the STEM disciplines, and that matter for the long term well-being of our planet and its people. Such learners will be citizens who value these disciplines both as an exciting venture of the human mind and for their essential role in enabling them to address the urgent scientific, social, and economic challenges facing our planet and its inhabitants. We are pursuing the following strategies to achieve this vision:  We have assembled a powerful group of “critical advisors”—national experts and leaders carefully selected for their diverse knowledge and experience. We first convened the group in January 2009 to discuss the lack of major progress in improving STEM education and the urgent problems facing us that require a better-informed and motivated citizenry and technical workforce. The group began discussing assumptions about drivers of change that might underlie more effective strategies to bring about the improved STEM higher education we believe is urgently required. The group also began to think about developing a “campaign” to carry out such a change agenda. A second meeting is scheduled in June.  On May 11, we are convening a meeting of people from higher education organizations and professional societies whose agendas overlap with ours to consider possibilities for a joint effort toward the development of such a campaign for change. The strong positive response of those invited to this meeting confirms our belief that the time is ripe for a cooperative movement toward our vision.

Dimensions of the Problem We Seek to Address

A. The critical needs that postsecondary STEM education must address Building on research evidence and our own professional experience, our group is focusing on a set of critical, interrelated needs pertaining to STEM education that postsecondary institutions must address. For two decades, national groups have issued urgent calls to address these same problems. Briefly, we must: 1. Address pressing real-world problems in the STEM curriculum and motivate students to work on such problems; 2. Make widespread use of research-grounded methods of effective teaching and of learning assessment, stressing the engagement of students; 3. Offer professional education in curriculum development, pedagogy, and learning assessment to STEM graduate students, faculty, and other instructors; and 4. Encourage more STEM graduates to enter K–12 math and science teaching and support their early careers. B. Recent efforts to improve postsecondary STEM education For more than two decades, programs that address some of these needs have been underway in all STEM disciplines and in all types of postsecondary institutions. For the most part, these programs operate at the grassroots level and focus on the development and testing of (a) real-world-relevant materials and methods for the STEM undergraduate curriculum and (b) teaching practices that enable and assess student learning. This work is grounded in a substantial body of research on how students learn best. It also is supported by program evaluation evidence linking use of these methods and curricula to increased student engagement, deeper and more transferable student learning, and greater diversity in the STEM student population. Sub- stantial progress has been made on bullets 1 and 2 in A, above. To synthesize the research about this progress, the National Research Council sponsored two workshops in 2008. (See the resulting papers at http://www7.nationalacademies.org/bose/PP_Commissioned _Papers.html)

C. Some factors that account for our slow progress Although STEM educators, collectively, are well-prepared to make these much-needed changes, without the kinds of effort and change to which our project is committed, we do not believe that this potential will be realized.  First, instructors in postsecondary institutions are slow to incorporate into their teaching the globally relevant resources and research-based teaching methods already developed. Furthermore, these promising and much-needed resources and practices are neither adopted (or adapted) by departments nor utilized on institutional and national levels. Indeed, they often are not sustained in their host institutions beyond the end of external grant funding. Research indicates that without changes to structural and cultural features of postsecondary institutions, particularly research universities, these problems of uptake and scale-up will not be solved.  Second, because the four needs articulated in item A are truly interrelated, efforts to meet the first two will not be truly effective until we also attend to the last two, which are thus far much less well addressed. Underlying these two observations, however, is a more fundamental problem. The most fundamental element of our diagnosis is that we have relied on a set of implicit - and apparently inadequate - assumptions about how pioneering improvement initiatives will be translated into system-wide policies and practices. For example, educators often assume that the uptake problem will be solved as a result of (a) the grassroots efforts of individuals, campus groups, and networks; (b) reliance on traditional modes of disseminating intellectual knowledge; or (c) people’s “natural” inclination to adopt new practices that are supported by convincing evidence. We believe that reliance on these and other inadequate assumptions about change is fundamental to our slow progress. Developing assumptions likely to be more effective will be a major emphasis of the June meeting of the critical advisors, and the resulting strategies will form the basis for our anticipated campaign.

D. The urgent global context and the role of postsecondary STEM education Wise and informed scholars and leaders counsel us all that the physical and social problems (global warming and climate change, the rapidly declining health of ecosystems, inadequate human health and nutrition, threats to water quality and quantity) facing our world are truly unprecedented. We need a professional workforce and a citizenry who understand the interrelated scientific and social dimensions of these complex problems and have the ability, skill, and motivation to address them. Postsecondary institutions are critical in developing these capacities in that they educate not only natural and computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers, but also policymakers, workers at every level in industry and business, and our K–12 teachers. Those engaged in STEM education improvement and the agencies and foundations that support their work should demand that institutions of higher education address the needs and problems that we have identified. Not only is doing this a responsibility, we believe, of institutions of higher education, but such an emphasis naturally (and urgently) provides a platform of real-world problems to engage students in STEM fields, as called for in bullet 1 in item A, above. What Distinguishes this Project from Others Our project is distinguished from others in two ways. First, we are addressing the underlying problem. The reason postsecondary institutions are not producing a citizenry and workforce that is sufficiently educated in the STEM disciplines is not because we are unaware of the need, or have few tools to address it, but becaus we have not confronted the difficult question of how to motivate and implement the kinds of organizational change that will accelerate the progress toward our vision for STEM education and motivate and enable individual faculty to make effective and widespread use of the available resources and knowledge. Our project confronts this problem head-on. Second, the timing is right. The gravity of world- wide problems in our physical and social environments is now so great that we believe we can convince key constituents to act on our recommendations and make the fundamental changes required to ensure that postsecondary institutions meet all of these urgent needs in coherent, nationwide, and sustainable ways. The response to date is most encouraging.

April, 2009