6
Role of Academic Units in Achieving Equitable and Effective Teaching
This chapter discusses the critical role of the smallest “organizational unit” that is centered on one or more science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines within an institution: the academic unit. Often a department (but not always), these units serve as structures of influence within the institution, which relies on them to coordinate and manage the academic process (Edwards, 1999). They determine course offerings, curricula, and teaching assignments; set major and minor requirements; appoint and promote teaching and administrative staff; and manage essential services for faculty members and students. It has been estimated that 80% of administrative decisions on campuses are made at the unit level (Carroll & Wolverton, 2004). This chapter focuses on how academic units—operating as they do at a structural level—can provide opportunities for effective implementation of the Principles outlined in this document through changes to their cultures, policies, practices, and structures. Where we refer back to specific Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching to make connections to content in this chapter we use the shorthand names presented in Table 4-1.
The academic unit plays an important role in shaping and understanding the impact of the collection of courses that comprises the curriculum, degree requirements, and other central elements that define the educational experience. This can include establishing a culture that supports inclusivity at all levels. As described in Chapter 5, there are many strategies that individual instructors can enact in their courses to put the Principles into action. An individual instructor enacting these Principles, however, will not address systemic inequities related to persistence in STEM majors and
degree completion. Some of these inequities are related to groups of courses and the connections between them—the collective impact of courses that the academic unit is uniquely positioned to oversee and influence. Others of course relate to larger pars of the system, the institution and society.
The unit-designed curriculum that leads to a degree within a discipline is one such group of connected courses; others include prerequisite course sequences and certificate programs. While the academic unit plays an important role in establishing these collections of courses, such clustering is only one aspect of curriculum. Clemmons et al. (2022) developed the “Intended-Enacted-Experienced” curriculum model to name and describe these multiple aspects and show how they relate to one another; the three aspects defined by Clemmons et al. are intended curriculum, enacted curriculum, and experienced, curriculum. When academic units or a group of instructors decide on and develop outcomes for a degree or certificate or program—as in the curriculum defined above—they are defining the intended curriculum. When instructors design and teach courses that are part of that program and are structured to help students achieve the outcomes, they are defining the enacted curriculum. The courses that students take, the conflicts between those courses, and the way they make progress through the set of courses is the experienced curriculum (this is discussed further in Chapter 7). In addition, some refer to another type of curriculum, the “hidden” curriculum of disciplinary norms and behavioral expectations that are implicit and reinforce existing structures (Andarvazh et al., 2017). Addressing challenges at the curricular level requires groups of faculty members to work together within the academic unit to examine the structures that underlie these various aspects of the curriculum, in order to make sure the intended and enacted curricula are based on outcomes that are transparent to students and allow for multiple pathways that accommodate real student needs and situations.
The chapter begins with a section on academic and disciplinary culture to inform analysis and reflection on how decisions are made about what is taught, who teaches it, and what the expectations are for student learning and instructor behavior.
The second section in this chapter considers the Principles as a whole and the ways to use them, as described in Chapter 5, to articulate how academic units might productively reflect on their courses and curriculum with a lens toward the desired goals for student learning. Specifically, it discusses approaches academic units can take to consider their intended curriculum, how it is being enacted now, and how students are experiencing it today. These kinds of approaches can help illuminate choices that can have significant implications for equitable and effective teaching. The way that CTE programs are often designed to help students reach specific learning outcomes is presented as a model that might be more broadly applicable.
The third section of the chapter focuses on certain aspects of the experienced curriculum, including how sequences of courses interact and the problematic role of toxic course combinations and how foundational courses often function as weed-out courses. The chapter ends with a discussion of incentive and rewards, especially highlighting the ways that the departmental and academic cultures discussed at the start of the chapter influence the value placed on instruction, the supports the unit does or does not provide for instructors, and the ways that teaching is measured and rewarded.
Program-level learning outcomes can be both a central tenet of the intended curriculum (e.g., the outcome or degree defined by instructors) that ensures active engagement in disciplinary knowledge and a means for improving flexibility and transparency (related to Principle 6: Flexibility and responsiveness and Principle 7: Intentionality and transparency) of the enacted curriculum (e.g., the design and structure of the courses that are actually taught).
ACADEMIC UNITS AND THEIR ROLE IN EQUITABLE TEACHING
For the purpose of the discussion that follows, the following characteristics are considered to be essential functions of the academic unit:
- Control over a set of courses intended to be experienced by students as an integrated curriculum or program that contributes to a degree, certificate, or other terminal certification from the institution.
- Some level of curricular and/or budgetary responsibility, even if it is often located in a single administrator (department chair, division head, etc.).
- A role in the hiring, review, promotion, and tenure of faculty.
Other characteristics may include (depending on institution type)
- Responsibility for STEM courses that serve students enrolled predominantly in other units in the institution (either degree requirements or general education requirements).
- Responsibility for determining which courses are acceptable to receive transfer credit for majors.
- Responsibility for graduate student education in a related discipline or interdisciplinary field, with the goal of a postgraduate terminal degree.
- Shared research interests.
These academic units can be departments or divisions or schools; they can be associated with a single major, house multiple majors, or represent interdisciplinary STEM programs. In many colleges and universities, the academic unit is the department, which consists of a group of faculty members within a particular discipline (e.g., biology, physics, geoscience) led by a department head or chair. Another common academic unit is an interdisciplinary program, which brings together faculty from many different departments (e.g., environmental science, data science), and is typically led by a program director. Both departments and programs in these settings offer undergraduate majors and may offer graduate degrees. Community colleges often have academic units that are broad (e.g., a science department), or may have divisions or other functional units that perform the functions described above.
Regardless of the name and composition, academic units hold a unique position with regard to undergraduate education. The Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education, as part of its examination of the current state of American undergraduate education, recommended that institutions must collaborate with academic units to make a systemic commitment to the improvement of undergraduate teaching (American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2017). The planning, evaluation, and oversight of a disciplinary unit’s collections of courses is naturally the responsibility of academic units, yet at many institutions, courses and how they are taught is not the top priority. While connected by a single or related disciplines, the faculty of academic units possess diverse interests, backgrounds, strengths, and experiences and each member has their own perspective on teaching.
In many cases, instructors are able to make decisions about their own courses and at most institutions teaching is evaluated at the level of individual faculty. However, students do not experience individual courses in a vacuum, but as a collection of courses within a curriculum designed by an academic unit. The ability to truly achieve both an equitable and effective learning experience requires understanding the interactions between the courses students take both simultaneously and sequentially, an understanding that the academic unit is particularly well positioned to achieve. As long as evaluations are focused exclusively on the single instructor and course, collective impacts will be overlooked. Yet the academic unit is well positioned to oversee the collection of courses experienced by students as a collective body that has the potential to achieve a culture of inclusivity and equity that could extend to individual classrooms. With the appropriate structures and culture, academic units could define learning goals and pedagogical approaches to improve the overall quality of the undergraduate learning experience.
The leader of the academic unit (e.g., department chair or program director) may play a leadership role within the university. In the case of department chairs, the position lies at a pivotal junction between the administration and the faculty and serves as a key connection between institutional priorities and faculty work by translating messages from senior institutional leaders, and interpreting questions, issues, and concerns expressed by faculty members (Austin, 2011; Bensimon et al., 2000; Chu, 2006). The role includes considerable duties and responsibilities to maintain the department as well as to meet the needs of the institution (Seagren et al., 1993). Department chairs can also deliberately work to create cultures in their units where equitable and effective teaching is valued and rewarded (Austin, 2011; Fairweather, 2008).
In the context of undergraduate teaching reform, while the policies and practices of academic units can have an immediate and lasting impact, research on their role as a lever for impacting equitable and effective teaching is an emerging area. The need to focus on this structural level is supported by the challenges inherent in sustaining change at the individual instructor level. Despite decades of scholarship to re-envision faculty roles and to develop rich, multisource systems for documenting teaching, these methods have not been broadly implemented into practice (Bernstein & Ginsberg, 2009; Bernstein & Huber, 2006; Glassick et al., 1997; Hutchings, 1996; Hutchings et al., 2011). Stated policies may not be reflected in actual practice, nor can they alone shift institutional structures and cultures to value teaching more highly. A richer, more complete process for transforming the assessment of effective and equitable teaching for tenure, promotion, and merit is necessary for systemic improvement of undergraduate education (Durodoye et al., 2020; Fairweather, 2002; Finkelstein et al., 2020; Heffernan, 2022; Huber, 2002; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2021; National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine [National Academies], 2020; Weaver et al., 2020). To promote more systemic change, there has been a shift away from funding isolated efforts within individual courses that do not require long-lasting reforms within academic institutions (Fairweather, 2008). Today many funders are designing solicitations with expectations for innovations to occur at scale and result in sustained institutional change (e.g., the National Science Foundation’s solicitations through the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education IUSE: EDU program1 and Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Inclusive Excellence Initiative2).
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1 More information about IUSE is available at https://new.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/iuse-edu-improving-undergraduate-stem-education-directorate-stem
2 More information about the Inclusive Excellence Initiative is available at https://www.hhmi.org/programs/inclusive-excellence-3
THE ROLE OF ACADEMIC AND DISCIPLINARY CULTURE IN SETTING EXPECTATIONS
Academic units are central to improving the quality of undergraduate education because they are the primary loci for cultural change. When students decide to major in a particular discipline, or to complete a program, they are signing on to more than a single course: they are committing to be part of the unit for multiple years. Therefore, no matter how strongly one might express the sentiment that “STEM disciplines are independent of culture,” faculty or students experience its culture, created—in part—by these units being social organizations. An important component of this culture is “sense of belonging.” If students feel like they belong and feel supported in developing their own identity within the discipline, they are more likely to be motivated to continue in their degree and to be successful in their courses. Research has shown that sense of belonging is correlated with performance (Master & Meltzoff, 2020) and is an important component of persistence through to degree completion. And yet, STEM programs can be perceived as “chilly” and “hostile,” and students can sometimes find it hard to identify a supportive and helpful advisor or mentor. This type of culture can create barriers to access (Jorstad et al., 2017; Marín-Spiotta et al., 2020), and an increasing number of students report switching out of a STEM major because of a competitive and/or unsupportive culture (Hunter, 2019).
While STEM environments can be chilly and hostile for instructors as well, disciplinary culture is powerful and many faculty members identify with and are more deeply connected to their unit or discipline than their institution (Austin et al., 2009). Some faculty members can primarily exist in separate unit-based worlds and may perceive themselves as having the greatest influence within their unit and see their unit as the space in which they could best create change if desired (Kezar et al., 2015; Tagg, 2012).
Another way to think of “culture” is as part of a unit’s “identity.” Although identity is often seen as the collection of characteristics of an individual, academic units have identities, too. By considering their unit’s identity, faculty can work together to develop a place where they and their students can belong (e.g., The AIP National Task Force to Elevate African American Representation in Undergraduate Physics & Astronomy, 2020). Academic units include faculty and instructors at all levels, staff, and students (in some cases, graduate and undergraduate). They include adjunct instructors whose primary place of “belonging” may be elsewhere. Developing a welcoming identity means working together to identify collective goals, where faculty talk about teaching and work together to improve their courses and create a place that makes students say, “Hey, I want to be part of that!”
Culture also extends to the curriculum. STEM instructors may have little experience discussing their ideas about teaching or creating courses
with others. As scholars protected by academic freedom, they may feel that this right means that they can teach what they want without being challenged or facing repercussions. This is, however, a misinterpretation of the meaning of academic freedom. Academic freedom is intended to protect unexpected or unconventional research findings, not to justify poor teaching. The collective faculty (sometimes in collaboration with a disciplinary society or a professional association) holds responsibility for defining the general parameters that govern teaching expectations and approaches. As a body, they place constraints on the actions of instructors in their teaching to ensure that it fits within the professional norms of their disciplines. This means that academic units have the responsibility to define the appropriate general parameters of content and pedagogical approach within the courses for which they are responsible, providing faculty with the general parameters within which they exercise their freedom.
The role of professional standards and competence within academic freedom points to the important connection between academic units and professional societies and between disciplinary and departmental/unit culture. The culture within a unit may arise from the experience of the discipline’s culture that is sometimes nurtured at professional meetings and within the practices of the larger profession (Austin, 1994, 1996; Finnegan & Gamson, 1996; Lee, 2007; Martin et al., 2015; Murzi et al., 2016, 2021; Tierney & Lanford, 2018). Therefore, sustained change at the unit level will be influenced by efforts to change or sustain the status quo in the larger discipline and profession.
Academic disciplines reflect conditions within the broader system of higher education. Chapter 2 briefly explores the history of how the higher education system in the United States has, from the beginning, involved systemic inequities based in part on a conception of science that is Western and Eurocentric (Mensah & Jackson, 2018; Morton et al., 2023). Throughout its development, the undergraduate curriculum has been both a reflection and perpetuation of its context. In the early history of the United States, most colonial college teachers were White men, who implemented a highly religious and Eurocentric curriculum consisting of languages (e.g., Greek, Latin) and the liberal arts (e.g., grammar, logic, arithmetic, geometry, music, etc.; Rudolph, 2021). In the late 1700s, some became interested in Europe’s Enlightenment movement, which introduced the basic tenets of Western science and other secular philosophies (Chalmers, 2013). Enlightenment ideas of specialized inquiry and the unrestricted pursuit of knowledge spread to university instructors in the Americas, and colonial faculty who had typically taught according to the interests of their college leadership and the church now used the concept of intellectual freedom to set up space and structures for more clearly defined disciplinary study (Cetina, 1999). They accomplished this by drawing boundaries around themselves and those
that were interested in similar subject matter, initiating “academic territories,” which grew into what are now called academic disciplines (Becher & Trowler, 2001).
Within these boundaries, scholars developed preferences for ways of framing, knowing, and studying the subject matter drawn from European ideas (Abbott, 1988; Cetina, 1999; Gonzales, 2018; Traweek, 1993). Since not all people were invited into the creation of these disciplines, only some ideas and ways of knowing set the foundation. For example, the first international meeting of sociologists and organizers explicitly excluded Black and Indigenous thinkers, who had much to offer on social matters (Go, 2020). The exclusion of People of Color and their ideas meant that the disciplines were being formed with partial views of the world, all of which served as the basis for research that led to racial harm (e.g., forced sterilization, discriminatory immigration policies; Graves et al., 2022). This example is emblematic of the ways that many academic disciplines and their disciplinary societies perpetuated both racial and epistemic exclusion in ways that continue to haunt some of the disciplines today (Cech et al., 2017; Go, 2020; Gonzales et al., 2024c; Kerr, 2014; Settles et al., 2021; Wilder, 2013).
In tandem with the growth of the disciplines, faculty members believed themselves experts and made calls for freedom of intellectual inquiry (now known as academic freedom) to break away from the heavily guided, or directed, curricular and intellectual work imposed by college leaders (Tiede, 2015). Rather than teaching what college and religious leaders defined, faculty wanted to develop and oversee the curriculum, have more control over their work, and have a larger role in any decision making that would shape the conditions of their work (e.g., shared governance; Tiede, 2015). This became a feature of American post-secondary education—the emphasis on elective and general education and the central role of faculty in planning curricular sequences.
This role of the faculty results in a curriculum that is constantly in flux (e.g., the enacted curriculum combines foundational knowledge with contemporary advances and debates in the field, which reflects its increasing complexity; Lattuca & Brown, 2023; Lattuca & Stark, 2011). Curricular decisions by academic units may therefore reflect the dominant views in the discipline or compromises based on disagreements from faculty in different subdisciplines instead of thoughtful analysis of the desired learning outcomes for undergraduates. In addition, when making curriculum decisions, designing courses, and teaching (e.g., developing the intended curriculum and then realizing the enacted curriculum), instructors commonly rely on Western histories and narratives around how knowledge has been and should be created (Álvarez & Coolsaet, 2020; McGinty & Bang, 2016; Medin & Bang, 2014), privilege Western scientific methods (Page-Reeves et
al., 2019; Smith, 2021), prioritize disciplinary methods and norms over interdisciplinary approaches (Gonzales et al., 2024c, Holley, 2009; O’Meara et al., 2023; Settles et al., 2021), and conceptualize student success in highly individualized ways (Brayboy, 2005; Lopez, 2021). These practices may be so deeply entrenched that they are unrecognized as conscious choices that faculty make in designing a curriculum, and changing these approaches requires deep, transformative change (Kania et al., 2018; Liera, 2023; Liera & Desir, 2023).
At the same time, faculty face external pressure as institutional leaders, legislators, and students increasingly call for curricular efficiencies that allow students to graduate quicker and reduce their debt burden (Lattuca & Brown, 2023). The desire for efficiencies often focuses on students who experience delays or challenges in making progress toward their degree. Misalignment occurs between the intended and experienced curricula due to inadequate coordination by the academic unit, irregular offerings of critical required courses, course combinations that produce high failure rates, “weed-out” introductory courses, and overall curricular complexity. Fixing this misalignment can better serve students in an equitable and affective manner and help avoid exacerbating inequities caused by students’ social position, sense of belonging in a major or discipline, and a lack of awareness of the hidden curriculum (Andarvazh et al., 2017; Jackson, 1968; Snyder, 1971), all of which reduce persistence and increase time to degree. That is, course structures and graduation requirements can both convey academic content and knowledge of the discipline and be aligned with common pathways taken by students to providing students with realistic routes toward degrees that work for their personal circumstances.
FOCUS ON COURSE AND PROGRAM LEARNING OUTCOMES
As mentioned above, academic units have many factors and influences that go into the determination of the curriculum. One key influence should be the learning outcomes discussed extensively at the course level in Chapter 5 and that emerged out of Principle 1: Active engagement; one effective way to do this is to outline the scope of the disciplinary learning that students will actively engage in during their time in a course or program. In addition, articulation of program-level learning outcomes (PLOs) lays the foundation for Principle 7: Intentionality and transparency at the program level. Articulating PLOs ensures that success is clearly defined in terms of measurable outcomes, providing the endpoint that students will reach.
When considering program learning outcomes, Principle 5: Multiple forms of data is useful both for defining program outcomes and for measuring whether or not they are being met. In terms of defining program
outcomes, academic units may consider qualitative data ranging from student goals to the needs/expectations of future employers, graduate schools, and professional schools. Program learning outcomes can be measured by taking key assessments in relevant courses to demonstrate different levels of achievement of specific PLOs disaggregated by different student groups. While this requires considerable commitment, regular data collection and measurement, sometimes achieved through a learning management system, can lead to substantial insights and improve overall program effectiveness.
Developing high-quality, well-articulated program-level outcomes is the work not of a single faculty member or department chair, but of all of the faculty and instructors who are engaged in a program. Engaging all instructors in the development of learning outcomes ensures that PLOs represent consensus, and that individual instructors will be more likely to make connections in their own courses to the program outcomes (Clark & Hsu, 2023). There are both challenges and opportunities to including a full range of instructor perspectives in these conversations. The example described in Box 6-1 shows how all members of a department can work together to audit their existing curriculum and determine what they as a group wish to prioritize for improvement across the courses offered. Though faculty often treat their courses as stand-alone entities, students experience courses collectively and benefit when they see coherence across the courses and also how each course is connected to the program outcomes.
Designing Curricula That Prepare Students for Life and Work
PLOs are the foundation of the intended curriculum and critical to transparency (Principle 7: Intentionality and transparency): they articulate the knowledge, skills, and dispositions expected of students who complete a given program. PLOs communicate to students, faculty, administrators, and external groups like accreditors and employers what constitutes mastery at that level in that discipline (Aloi et al., 2003).
When groups of instructors are working together to design (or redesign) the curriculum for a degree, major or minor program, or certificate, starting with program-level learning outcomes gives them the ability to use a backward design approach as discussed in Chapter 5 (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) to align the intended and enacted curriculums. PLOs provide guidance for developing course-level learning outcomes that support students in achieving the program-level outcomes. In addition, program-level learning outcomes are the basis for the development of programmatic assessments and application of the outcomes in a curriculum matrix (see example in Figure 6-1 and associated material in Box 6-1) to determine where the outcomes are introduced, practiced, and needed throughout the curriculum (Clark & Hsu, 2023; Towns, 2010).
NOTE: An example of a portion of a curriculum matrix for an undergraduate program in the geosciences showing program-level learning outcomes and courses in which they are addressed. NOTE: Each column has two designations. The first indicates the degree of emphasis placed on the outcome in the associated course: Primary Focus (PF); Secondary Focus (SF). The second indicates the level of competency the student will achieve in each course: Beginning (B); Developing (D); Proficient (P). For additional information on the use of matrices see https://serc.carleton.edu/departments/degree_programs/matrix.html
SOURCE: Committee generated based on information related to the National Association of Geoscience Teachers example in Box 6-1.
BOX 6-1
Using a Curriculum Matrix in the Geosciences
Since 2014, the National Association of Geoscience Teachers has been running a Traveling Workshops Program (TWP) to help geoscience departments in building stronger and more inclusive cultures, curricula, and courses (Egger & Robinson, 2024). A pair of experienced TWP facilitators works with department leaders to develop a workshop that meets the needs of the department, typically run over two days. One of the most common components of these workshops is developing and using a matrix to conduct a curriculum audit.
Prior to the workshop, facilitators ask participants (all faculty and instructors in a department or program) to do some homework. The homework includes a reflection prompt to envision a student who has successfully completed the program: what knowledge, skills, and dispositions does this student possess, and how has the program helped them develop these characteristics? The facilitators collect these reflections and share themes and commonalities with all participants. These commonalities are then used to develop or refine program learning outcomes. The characteristics of a successful student that are agreed upon by all participants are typically skills, whereas existing program outcomes may be focused on content knowledge, which participants tend to disagree on in that they differ about the relative importance of different topics.
The new and/or revised learning outcomes are then incorporated into a curriculum matrix. In general, the curriculum matrix is a way to visualize the extent to which a department is supporting its students in meeting their program learning outcomes: program learning outcomes are listed on one axis and individual courses on the other, and in each box, faculty can indicate whether a skill is introduced, developed, or expected in that course (the exact schema can vary).a
The initial completion of the matrix generates highly productive discussions. In some cases, groups realize that a learning outcome is over- or under-emphasized in the existing curriculum, leading to changes in courses. In other cases, they realize that the program learning outcomes do not truly reflect what they emphasize in their courses, and they revise the outcomes. The matrix thus becomes a living document that instructors can continually refer and add to.
Importantly, these exercises are engaged in as a team—full participation of everyone in the department facilitates shared knowledge about what is going on in others’ courses and is a critical component of successful implementation. In post-workshop evaluations, participants commonly mention the team approach with broad participation and the curriculum matrix as the most valuable things they learned. From 2014 to 2024, facilitators have led departments through the matrix approach activity at more than 80 institutions, including two-year colleges, small, private liberal arts schools, and large research universities.
a Figure 6-1 provides an example, and additional information on the use of matrices can be found at https://serc.carleton.edu/departments/degree_programs/matrix.html
SOURCE: Egger and Robinson (2024).
Well-articulated program outcomes allow for flexibility in the curriculum (related to Principle 6: Flexibility and responsiveness). Clear articulation between program outcomes and course outcomes allows courses to be designed, chosen, and incorporated into the curriculum on the basis of how they help students make progress toward the program outcomes rather than individual instructor preferences. This clear articulation can be particularly useful for transfer students, whose receiving institution may recognize that they have already met certain outcomes articulated by the intended curriculum through a different collection of courses taken at their previous institution, allowing them to make faster progress toward their degree. Creating a framework where students understand their course choices in terms of outcomes instead of required courses may potentially provide increased clarity, flexibility, and leveraging of prior knowledge and may help attract more students to enter and continue in the program (for more information see the discussion of specifications grading in Chapter 8). Students can also gain a level of ownership that builds directly on affective aspects of learning, social belonging, and identify as a STEM practitioner.
PLOs also describe the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions for which the instructors in different STEM disciplines and at different institutions are responsible for writing and implementing, leading to variations (e.g., Clark & Hsu, 2023). In most STEM disciplines and at most institutions, instructors involved in a degree program are responsible for writing and implementing program learning outcomes, and thus the specific knowledge, skills, and dispositions described vary across institutions (e.g., Clark & Hsu, 2023). To ensure that program learning outcomes are meaningfully designed and incorporated throughout a degree program in an intentional and transparent way, lessons can be learned from STEM disciplines for which accrediting bodies provide expected learning outcomes and use those as one basis for program accreditation, including chemistry (e.g., Towns, 2010) and engineering (e.g., Spurlin et al., 2008).
Career and Technical Education Curricula Integrate Workforce Needs
What is now commonly referred to as “career and technical education” (CTE) is an important part of the higher educational STEM landscape and includes education that typically occurs at community colleges and prepares students for careers in health care, advanced manufacturing, biotechnology, and more. In many cases, graduates of CTE programs enter the workforce in jobs that are poised for advancement within that industry sector, providing that the student obtains, or already has, appropriate educational credentials. The incorporation of job-readiness programming in higher education has gone through significant historical shifts with the decline in vocational
training programs and a more recent rise in CTE programs (Benavot, 1983; Kim, 2021). The current structure of CTE programs sometimes provides credentials that do not contribute to the requirements for four-year degrees; this can hamper students who wish to pursue further education after taking CTE courses (Hong et al., 2021; Soliz, 2023). Current CTE programs do often provide education on technical skills, employability skills (sometimes described as “soft skills”), and academic knowledge, and these could be recognized in transferable credentials that are parallel to those other students acquire through liberal arts or general educational courses (Lindsay et al., 2024; Matthews, 2022).
The Perkins Act and its subsequent reauthorization3 (discussed in Chapter 2), together with other legislation and proposed government initiatives, has played a major role in supporting an “education-to-work pipeline,” with particular impacts on CTE in community and technical colleges (Cushing et al., 2019). The 2006 Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Improvement Act (Perkins IV)4 was reauthorized and updated in 2018 as the Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act.5 The 2018 update included expansion of targeted funding (Edgerton, 2022). One important aspect of these acts is that, in contrast to the way that traditional disciplinary academic units make decisions about course content and major requirements, local educational agencies (LEAs) are required to assess the implementation of the curriculum. This puts the LEAs in the position of overseeing aspects of pedagogy, professional learning, and curriculum development (Cushing et al., 2019).
When educators work with local industry to identify the components of student education in those industries, students’ ability to join the workforce with appropriate competencies can be significantly enhanced. Technical skills, professional “employability skills,” and academic preparation are all needed for work. This results in a situation in which faculty at the instructional, department, and institutional levels benefit from gaining knowledge of the local industry and aligning their teaching methods, course and program content, and physical resources such as instrumentation and classroom spaces to align with the workforce needs of the community. This can be done in a variety of ways, including work with local advisory boards, the U.S. Department of Labor, state agencies, and directly with employers.
It is worth noting that in the context of this culture of alignment with community workforce needs, CTE at large is generally adaptive and nimble. This means that programs are able to adapt to evolving employer
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3 Carl D. Perkins Vocational and Technical Education Act, 20 U.S.C. § 2301 (1984).
4 Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Improvement Act, 20 U.S.C. § 2301 (2006).
5 Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act, 2018.
needs—for example, ensuring students acquire a variety of skills when technology or priorities change the hiring needs. CTE programs frequently recognize that employers value employees with more than just focused technical skills and include learning outcomes related to work skills as well. What used to be called “terminal” or “vocational” education is being transformed into what Kisker et al. likened to “a LEGO brick construction where degrees, certificates, and other non-degree credentials can be put together in various formations to enable educational and career advancement” (Kisker et al., 2023, p. 385). These curricular pathways, in recent years, have taken on the form of “stacked credentials” in which a student can, for example, work toward a certificate, and enter the workforce with entry-level skills while continuing toward a B.S. degree or higher. Likewise, a student with a non-CTE degree may return to school to obtain a certificate or an applied associate degree in order to gain job skills for career advancement or career transition.
CONSIDER CURRICULAR COMPLEXITY AND COHERENCE
There are several key factors beyond the desired learning outcomes to keep in mind when making decisions about curriculum. As alluded to above, these include the ways instructors will enact the curriculum and the ways that students will experience the curriculum. Specifically, it is very useful for academic units to consider their existing curriculum and what is and is not working well with it. Below we present one approach that can help with that process: curriculum audits. We then discuss the key role of foundational courses and the need to consider the academic and personal goals of the students taking the foundational courses in the units’ purview. For example, chemistry departments frequently have many students in their foundational courses who intend to study life sciences, health, sciences, or engineering, among other fields, in addition to those who may be interested in specializing in chemistry. It is therefore valuable to consider the ways existing formats and structures for foundational courses do or do not serve the students who are likely to enroll. The role that foundational courses often play as “weed-out” courses that discourage students from pursuing further study is also an important consideration for curriculum design as is the potential for the toxic course combinations (such as students who take calculus and chemistry in their first term as undergraduate) discussed in the previous chapter.
Auditing Curricula
One tool that can be used to help achieve this is Curricular Analytics,6 a freely available software program that allows users to create visualizations of curricula and model student pathways to identify bottlenecks and other friction points. The Curricular Analytics Project,7 led by the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities (UERU) uses this software in its study of the connection between curricular structure and complexity and student outcomes such as time to degree, retention, and graduation rates across multiple research universities and STEM disciplines. It is increasingly recognized that assessment professionals can play a critical role in designing, developing, and evaluating Curricular Analytics to improve student learning and reducing student dropouts (De Silva et al., 2024).
Attending to Foundational Courses
Foundational courses and course sequences are critical to student motivation, persistence, and sense of belonging (see Chapter 3 for more detail). The structure and offerings of these courses is often determined not by a single instructor, but by a group of instructors or an academic unit; therefore, coordination and collaboration are needed to make change (e.g., Herman et al., 2018; Matz et al., 2018). A collaborative environment is crucial to this type of transformation effort to improve STEM education and the formation of communities of practice can help instructors to work together to make instruction more student centered (Gehrke & Kezar, 2017; Kezar et al., 2017). Studies have examined how developing communities of practice for a particular course or course sequence can bring together the group of people involved to then work together toward implementing more equitable and effective practices (Benabentos et al., 2021; Tomkin et al., 2019). In cases where courses or course sequences are articulated between institutions (e.g., two-year and four-year transfer agreements) or taught at multiple campuses of a single institution, engaging instructors in a community of practice can enhance communication and coordination (Martinez et al., 2022). Some of the complexities that result from students taking courses across institutions and academic units is discussed further in the section on how to align policies and approaches later in this chapter. Communities of practice and their role in professional learning and development are discussed further in Chapter 8.
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6 More information on Curricular Analytics is available at https://curricularanalytics.org/home
7 More information on the Curricular Analytics Project is available at https://www.ueru.org/ueru-communities/curricular-analytics-project
Foundational courses are often taught in multiple sections even on one campus in order to decrease class size, and some institutions use course coordinators to manage the overall effort (Bazett & Clough, 2021; Dettori & Settle, 2005; Sathianathan, 1997; Villalobos et al., 2021). An appropriately prepared course coordinator can help ensure that equitable and effective teaching practices are employed by all instructors, including teaching/learning assistants (Bressoud & Rasmussen, 2015). Coordinators can help instructors to work collectively and collaboratively, reflect on their pedagogical approaches, and share resources and approaches with each other. The instructional team can reflect upon the effectiveness of their approach. One retrospective study of course coordinators for introductory mathematics found three drivers for change that coordinators are equipped to offer when they understand the local context and culture: (a) provide materials and tools, (b) encourage collaboration and communication, and (c) encourage (and provide) professional development (Williams et al., 2022).
The strategies for course design described in Chapter 5 can be implemented in multi-section courses and course sequences as well. Implementation in these settings benefits from a systemic approach that includes all members of the instructional team. Strategies that show promise for reforming introductory STEM courses include
- Developing learning outcomes that span multiple cognitive levels and include higher-order thinking skills (Clark & Hsu, 2023).
- Engaging students in work that makes explicit connections between content and their lives (Canning et al., 2018; Gosselin et al., 2019; James & LaDue, 2021).
- Increasing course structure and the use of active learning strategies (Casey et al., 2023; Freeman et al., 2011; Haak et al., 2011).
- Incorporating mixed assessment methods and de-emphasizing high-stakes exams (Cotner & Ballen, 2017; Ralph et al., 2022).
- Engaging a faculty community with disaggregated student data in an equity mentoring format.
Making these changes in courses typically described as “weed-out” courses (Weston et al., 2019) may require a more substantial shift in culture. In many STEM fields, there are expectations that students will develop a common set of competencies by taking certain required courses that use predetermined assessment strategies in a specific sequence (e.g., Yother et al., 2022). Faculty members may worry that if their department adopts curricula or teaching methods that do not align with disciplinary norms and expectations, their program’s reputation and prestige may suffer (e.g., O’Meara et al., 2023). Professional socialization may lead to the
perpetuation of weed-out courses more so than explicit decisions by an academic unit or curriculum committee (Weston et al., 2019). As such, examining the assumptions about introductory courses and their roles, coupled with exploration of the data of who succeeds in these courses, can open the door to broader change in approach (Weston et al., 2019).
The role of mathematics requirements, course sequencing, and availability has received significant attention as a potential barrier to participation in STEM degrees. Within the past decade, a substantial portion of open-access institutions have implemented accelerated courses in developmental math, recognizing that early math coursework potentially serves as a roadblock not just to STEM degree attainment but to degree attainment broadly (e.g., Rutschow et al., 2019). Again, while much of this work focuses on the community college context, a series of longitudinal randomized controlled trials conducted among The City University of New York students observed that co-requisite math remediation has significantly greater benefits than just remediation (Logue et al., 2019). Rather than having students taking developmental courses first, co-requisite remediation involves placing underprepared students directly into college-level courses with co-requisite supports, such as in-class tutoring, online learning laboratories, or a supplemental class (Cerna et al., 2023). Some corequisite courses integrated culturally relevant instruction and the implementation of such courses increased students’ understanding of the course content and their coursework engagement (Cerna et al., 2023). It is worth noting that co-requisite remediation requires a restructuring of the curriculum that creates new interdependencies and reconfigures students’ trajectories. Understanding the impact of approaches such as co-requisite remediation and supporting students in navigating these new pathways ultimately requires coordination across disciplines and academic as well as an institutional commitment to support the necessary changes to processes, policies, and institutional structures.
ALIGN POLICIES AND APPROACHES
Academic units and programs typically include members at different ranks with a range of emphases in their roles. Unit leaders may not always feel they have the power or authority to advance change, yet they generally do have the ability to get issues onto the agenda of the unit. This ability could be used to elevate attention to instruction and to engage instructors in discussions about how existing policies do or do not contribute to equitable and effective teaching practices. As articulated in Chapter 4 under Principle 6: Flexibility and responsiveness and Principle 7: Intentionality and transparency, both formal policies and unspoken and implicit assumptions can influence many aspects of teaching and learning.
For example, many STEM units and disciplines have expectations about grading practices, academic integrity, and assignment deadlines that may have been established to support outdated views of standards and rigor. When norm-based grading (i.e., grading on a curve) is used to evaluate students relative to one another as opposed to evaluating whether or not each student has met the course learning goals, artificial factors determine the distribution of final grades in courses and systemic inequities are exacerbated (Bowen & Cooper, 2021). These policies and practices stand in the way of equitable and effective teaching for all students.
There is a growing body of literature on the design of assessments that are more equitable, are less prone to academic integrity violations, and maintain the standards expected by faculty (Denaro et al., 2022; Eslami et al., 2024; Webb & Paul, 2023). This includes alternative approaches to determining grades for students as described in Chapter 5, such as specifications grading, contract grading, mastery-based grading, and ungrading (Blum & Kohn, 2020; Nilson & Stanny, 2023; Tsoi et al., 2019).
Without buy-in and support of the unit leader and members, alignment between policies and teaching approaches at this structural level is not truly sustainable, and this can lead to significantly different teaching approaches across courses, which can cause confusion among students and sometimes outright conflict between instructors. It is not the case that everyone and every course needs to be the same, but it is desirable that approaches used are acceptable to the unit as a whole and that they collectively support defined unit goals. Ideally, the learning goals for the courses and programs would be communicated clearly and transparently to students, with an explanation as to how the variety of approaches is used achieve these goals. The Departmental Action Team approach described in Box 6-2 is one example of how members of an academic unit can work together to advance change and build consensus among unit members.
Another critical issue for academic units in the alignment of policies and approaches is the criteria for review, tenure, and promotion, which codifies what is valued within a faculty members’ work (discussed further later in this chapter). For VITAL educators (visiting faculty, instructors, teaching assistants, adjunct faculty, and lecturers), these criteria are important for fair and equitable review of performance that could lead to contract renewal. For tenure-track faculty at research universities, criteria for promotion place a greater value on research productivity over teaching effectiveness. In many teaching-focused universities, substantial evidence of teaching is important, but may emphasize numerical scores on student evaluations or number of students served over the use of equitable and effective practices. In both cases, there is an external disincentive to modify or overhaul courses or change current teaching practices. While criteria for review are the purview of the unit, they can be modified to strengthen the role of effective and equitable teaching in review, tenure, and promotion.
BOX 6-2
How Departmental Action Teams Advance Equity
Departmental Action Teams (DATs) consist of fewer than ten faculty, students, and staff representing various groups within a single department that meet regularly for multiple semesters. Following an action research paradigm, DAT projects support the implementation and institutionalization of change and promote better use of research on learning and systemic change. They are driven by six core principles (Quan, 2019, as cited in DAT, n.d.; Reinholz et al., 2021, p. 130):
- Students are partners in the educational process.
- Work focuses on achieving collective positive outcomes.
- Data collection, analysis, and interpretation inform decision making.
- Collaboration between group members is enjoyable, productive, and rewarding.
- Continuous improvement is an upheld practice.
- Work is grounded in a commitment to equity, inclusion, and social justice.
DAT participants decide on the focus for their own group. External and internal facilitators with different expertise in research, institutional change, and supporting collaborative groups help the participants create a shared vision and goals. DAT participation can be incentivized in many ways, such as through service credit or performance reviews.
DATs have focused on various initiatives in the past (Ngai et al., 2020):
- Developing a new undergraduate major
- Developing assessment plans
- Monthly seminars on diversity, equity, and inclusion
- A multi-year undergraduate skills assessment
- Program-level student learning outcomes
- Ongoing study of student experiences for the purposes of improving the undergraduate program
- Implementation of a peer mentoring program
While most institutions have unit- and institution-based metrics and/or dashboards to look at student retention and completion, fewer have disaggregated those outcomes via student demographics and intersections of identities, and even fewer have shared disaggregated D, F, and withdraw rates and GPA outcomes or linked measures of incoming student opportunity with outcomes or social mobility measures (Shapiro & Tang, 2019). Tools to do this kind of data analysis are growing (see Chapter 9). In general, many of the approaches taken at the unit level can work at the institution level. Aggregating values but allowing the disaggregation by
unit and student intersecting identities can point out inequities across the various parts of an institution. While a dashboard that is able to show the data and allow for multiple disaggregation is technically achievable, there is often no particular individual or group that is responsible for interrogating and making sense of such data. At some research universities, an individual in the office of undergraduate education, an educational effectiveness leader, and/or a leader of a teaching center may take on such an activity. Without adequate support from institutional leadership, unit leaders, and faculty, the potential impact of their work tends to be limited. Some institutions may choose to outsource such work to consultants and/or private companies, but often the level of inquiry will be shallow, focused primarily on retention and graduation, often with limited disaggregation and/or buy-in by academic units and their faculty. Others house these efforts in central offices (e.g., California State University System Office and the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office), where such tools have been created and made widely accessible, but it has been less clear who is responsible for reviewing and acting on the data within academic units.
In considering the use of data to understand if change is successful, one example is the assessment of the impact of the Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology initiative and the development of the Vision and Change document in the biological sciences. This document was written to provide guidance for pedagogy and curricula in U.S. undergraduate biology (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2009). In addition, a validated tool for assessing the implementation of the Vision and Change document, the BioSkills Guide (Clemmons et al., 2020), has been developed and validated base on the input from biology faculty from various institutions. Vision and Change makes use of some approaches highlighted in this chapter such as the articulation of learning outcomes; it provides general outcomes from professionals in the field that can be used by departments to establish specific learning outcomes for their programs.
A study of Vision and Change efforts provided the ability to compare three levels of the curriculum: (a) intended curriculum, learning outcomes recommended at the program level or planned at the course level; (b) enacted curriculum, learning outcomes taught and/or assessed in a course; and (c) experienced curriculum, learning outcomes reported by students as being taught (Clemmons et al., 2022). This three-part curricular model is important to evaluate as it can help assess how effective the departmental level of reform (intended curriculum) can be at creating effective and equitable outcomes at the student level (experienced curriculum). A key step is for individual faculty to embrace the program outcomes that are expected to be in their course and commit to teaching them (enacted curriculum). Clemmons et al. used the BioSkills curriculum survey to evaluate the effectiveness
of adoption of Vision and Change learning outcomes; their work provides evidence of how to measure this process, and a snapshot of the status of the initiative across a number of biology departments. As one might expect, there remains important work to be done to align the three levels of curriculum, but the power of this assessment illustrates important next steps. For example, Clemmons et al. were able to identify learning outcomes that are less likely to appear in assessments, pointing to the need for more work in this space. This is especially important given that they also found that the assessment of learning outcomes increased the likelihood of students recognizing that the particular learning outcomes were part of the course.
Consider Student Experiences Taking Courses Across Multiple Academic Units
The enacted curriculum sets a path for students to achieve an end goal—a credential, or degree. But students’ variability in reaching the common end goal (e.g., the range of experienced curricula) is shaped by their individual momentum and trajectory. Students’ academic momentum is influenced by their background, previous coursework, access to advising, sense of belonging, willingness to accrue debt, relationships with instructors, quality of teaching, and many other factors (Wang, 2017; Zhang, 2022). That is, academic momentum may be slowed when the experienced curriculum does not align with the intended curriculum. Many of the challenges lie in building the pathway across academic units and institutions; therefore, institutional leaders may need to coordinate cross-unit conversations to ensure alignment and consistency within their institution or to revisit articulation agreements with feeder colleges, which determine which courses transfer between institutions. The enacted and experienced curriculum spans academic units: essentially all STEM disciplines require some courses that are “outside” the discipline and department in which the major is housed. They also span institutions, as when students transfer or take a course at another institution. This is especially true for foundational course sequences that rely on each other in terms of content covered as well as courses in related fields that rely on specific cross-disciplinary content. For instance, the second general chemistry course builds on the first content and may also rely on math courses while introductory biology may build upon elements of the general chemistry courses. Data can be used to understand outcome consistency and coordination within and across courses enabling the majority of students taking the courses to engage in the relevant content in a fairly consistent manner. This consistency can be coupled with increased coordination between departments to improve the utility of introductory courses rather than acting as screens, or barriers, to student retention.
In biology, an introductory course may rely on both chemistry and mathematics knowledge for successful completion. Often these co- or prerequisite relationships have not been reviewed for years, and courses in other departments may have been used intentionally or unintentionally as “filters” to limit the students that get through instead of ensuring that students gain the knowledge and skills needed to be successful in the course (Weston et al., 2019). For example, some biology programs may require calculus and introductory chemistry courses before enrollment, even though the necessary chemistry is taught in the biology courses and calculus is not used at all. Analysis of the curriculum audits discussed above can sometimes make clear that the prerequisite courses were used as barriers to limit who enters. Data tools to measure, clarify, and support these types of situations and help identify ways to improve them are nascent. Some campuses have minimized these issues by adopting a “common goods” approach to the introductory STEM courses whereby the instructors teaching these courses come together as a community to uncover and minimize toxic course combinations and unnecessary co- and prerequisites. For example, to increase student retention and success in engineering, Wright State University developed a freshman-level engineering math course which did not require traditional math prerequisites and instead moved core engineering courses earlier in the program, redefining the way in which engineering math was taught (Klingbeil, 2004).
Potentially more challenging, but equally important, is the need to coordinate across not just academic units but entire institutions, especially between two-year and four-year institutions, in order to ensure support for transfer student success. Preparation for transfer and post-transfer success in STEM present several additional structural barriers that students must navigate. Unstructured curricular and programmatic choices have been a longstanding challenge (Bailey et al., 2015a; Van Noy et al., 2016). As alluded to above, this can lead students to take courses outside of what is required for their programs, which can delay them in receiving the credentials they are pursuing (Packard et al., 2012; Wang, 2020).
Measure Curricular Complexity to Understand Student Experiences
There are a number of emerging data approaches that can help address issues of curricular complexity. Student flows through the curriculum can be studied via Sankey diagrams, such as those enabled by the free UC Davis Ribbon tool8 (Bradforth et al., 2015) or available in many popular visual-
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8 More information on the UC Davis Ribbon Tool is available at https://cee.ucdavis.edu/tools
ization programs (Tableau,9 Power BI,10 SAS® Visual Analytics11). These tools make it easy to understand how students flow in and out of majors, if there are discrepancies between different groups of students, and identify areas for further investigation. See examples in Chapter 9.
Program leaders can also examine the impact of pre- and co-requisite structures on time to degree. The UERU Curricular Analytics Project mentioned earlier has developed a tool to help identify potential curricular bottlenecks and also logistical ones where students who may not succeed in a course the first time can be delayed up to a year in their degree progression if that course is only offered during one term each academic year. Groups that manage curricular programs can also discuss in detail which skills and knowledge are needed for particular courses (e.g., which specific quantitative skills are expected for an upper-level course) and bring that information to other departments to determine which courses should be prerequisites and which are not necessary for students to be successful. This process can help streamline the curriculum and increase the intentionality and transparency of the curriculum to students (related to Principle 7: Intentionality and transparency). In addition, identifying the specific skills and knowledge can support alternative means for students to demonstrate mastery of skills to succeed in a course, which provides flexibility (related to Principle 6: Flexibility and responsiveness) for students who transfer or return to degree programs after time in the workforce.
Local as well as larger-scale sources of information (e.g., University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey,12 National Survey of Student Engagement13) can be critical in determining if there are inequities that are manifesting in differences in retention, completion, and opportunity for students from different groups. Policies related to who is allowed to enter a major and how the criteria may change depending on route in (direct or transfer), course repeat policies, minimum grade for progress, registration and billing, accommodation approach, timing for course withdrawal, and more can affect different student groups differently, and may create challenges to equitable instruction and outcomes. All of these sources of information, along with more traditional measures (i.e., grades and completion rates) of who is succeeding in introductory courses and who is struggling, can paint a fuller picture and help identify areas for improvement.
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9 More information on Tableau is available at https://www.tableau.com/
10 More information on Power BI is available at https://powerbi.microsoft.com/
11 More information on SAS Visual Analytics is available at https://www.sas.com/en_us/software/visual-analytics.html
12 More information about the University of California Undergraduate Experience Survey is available at https://www.ucop.edu/institutional-research-academic-planning/services/survey-services/UCUES.html
Another challenge in STEM education is ensuring that lower-division courses appropriately prepare students for their upper-division courses (e.g., Hsu et al., 2008). This design challenge involves taking a developmental approach, considering the knowledge and skills that students can develop in lower-division courses that they can build on in upper-division courses and subsequent careers. Successfully considering these challenges can help to make the learning goals for individual courses and for majors or programs more transparent as well as more intentional (Principle 7: Intentionality and transparency). This developmental approach can help identify the key concepts it is important for students to learn and facilitate a move away from a focus on content coverage (Petersen et al., 2020). When the volume of material students encounter is appropriate for the length of the course, students may be more able to develop deeper understanding of the content. In some academic units longstanding traditions about course ownership and the sense that coverage of certain topics must be preserved can make these types of changes challenging and significant changes to course content and teaching approaches are likely to require a collective department effort to have the potential for success.
The considerations around course content and sequencing are even more numerous at community colleges where students intend to transfer to multiple four-year institutions. While articulation agreements can facilitate this process by providing documentation of what courses will transfer for credit at the new institution, many are based on outdated learning outcomes that may not have been revisited for many years. Community college faculty may feel constrained in making changes to courses because they are articulated to a four-year college. Yet, instructors at the four-year college may be unaware of these agreements and never have the chance to look at syllabi and grant credit to students for having taken other equivalent courses solely because a previous agreement was already in place.
Evaluation of Teaching
The changes in teaching strategies and classroom culture needed to achieve equitable and effective teaching will originate with and be led by the instructor. This requires significant and sustained effort. Instructors have many competing demands on their time and in some contexts are incentivized and rewarded for their research. In most higher education contexts instructors are now playing an expanded role in supporting the increasingly nuanced aspects of the student experience. Instructors have long needed to support students by providing accommodations for learning or physical disabilities. They must also attend to providing appropriate support to students with diverse gender identities and students who are underserved due to race/ethnicity, transfer status, country of origin, and other factors.
These aspects are critically important in creating an inclusive and equitable learning environment in which all students can succeed. But they are also skills that an instructor must learn and must be able to attend to: in other words, these skills require more time and effort from an instructor than was assumed decades ago. Therefore, a message that these efforts are valued and supported by academic units and institutions can be a powerful motivator.
Equitable and effective teaching is unlikely to happen in a widespread manner if the work is not valued by academic units, considered in teaching evaluations, and rewarded equitably and reliably. The reliability and depth of information provided by student surveys is not robust enough to allow an academic unit to properly evaluate any given members teaching and newer approaches that give better insights into teaching behaviors have been proposed (discussed later in this section).
Institutions are beginning to explore “holistic” approaches to evaluate the increased complexities of teaching (Follmer Greenhoot et al., 2020; National Academies, 2020; Weaver et al., 2020). Holistic evaluation systems involve the collection of multiple forms of evidence which represent the perspective and voices of students, the instructor, and some third parties (Krishnan et al., 2022; Transforming Higher Education Multidimensional Evaluation of Teaching, n.d.). For example, the traditional method of collecting end-of-course student surveys can be one form of evidence representing the student voice and perspective. For instructors, evidence could include the course materials (e.g., the syllabus, course assessments, assignments) and samples of student work. Instructors can also solicit external letters describing the impact of their work, provide a citation for research articles or conference presentations on education research, or prepare a reflection on their teaching and how they plan to adjust in the future.
Third-party evidence can supplement both the instructor and student evidence. One common form of evidence is a peer observation carried out by another instructor or member of a teaching and learning center. The observation is facilitated by a validated observation tool or rubric (e.g., COPUS,14 TDOP,15 TQF,16 CUE,17 etc.) accompanied by a pre-observation discussion with the instructor to understand the structure and goals of the course. The observations themselves should span a substantial portion of the term in order to gain a complete understanding of the dynamics of the
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14 More information about the Classroom Observation Protocol for the Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) is available at https://cwsei.ubc.ca/resources/tools/copus.html
15 More information about the Teaching Dimensions Observational Protocol (TDOP) is available at https://tdop.wceruw.org/
16 More information about the Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) is available at https://www.colorado.edu/teaching-quality-framework/about-tqf
17 More information about the tools developed by the Center for Urban Education (CUE) is available https://www.cue-tools.usc.edu/all-tools
course and the student-student and student-instructor interactions. Thus, in a holistic evaluation system, all of this evidence is placed in context and helps ensure a more complete and accurate evaluation.
Holistic evaluation systems can also include multiple categories (or dimensions) of work. These dimensions will depend on the alignment of the cultures and values of the unit or institution with its educational mission. The Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness approach at the University of Kansas (Follmer Greenhoot et al., 2020) has seven dimensions: goals, content, and alignment; teaching practices; class climate; achievement of learning outcomes; reflection and iterative growth; mentoring and advising; and involvement in teaching service, scholarship, or community. Each of these can be examined through more than one lens using varying forms of evidence. Another example is the Holistic Evaluation of Teaching (HET) project at UCLA18 which uses four dimensions to define excellent teaching and carry out their evaluations: it engages students, is equitable, is learning centered and responsive, and strives to improve. As these examples show, there are different ways to define these dimensions in support of equitable and effective teaching.
To best support these efforts, the evaluation of teaching must support instructors with both the formative and summative feedback they need about student learning and about their teaching approaches (see discussions in Chapter 5 and National Academies, 2020). Students unfamiliar with the methods are sometimes resistant to active learning approaches (Andrews et al., 2020; Finelli et al., 2018; Tharayil et al., 2018). It has been reported that instructors making a transition to the teaching practices advocated in this report fear a decrease in students survey scores, and this could be a deterrent to faculty choosing to reform their teaching practices; however, there is little evidence to support such declines (Henderson et al., 2018).
SUMMARY
Academic units (e.g., departments, interdisciplinary programs, etc.) are located at a key level of institutional change where they may be able to influence the larger institutional policies and certainly can influence instructor behavior by providing opportunities, support, and incentives for attention to teaching and equity. When members of the academic unit agree to act collectively and come to agreement about course, major, or program learning outcomes, the unit provides a structure for developing a clearly articulated curricular structure that supports those learning outcomes. This in turn provides a solid foundation for creating equitable and effective teaching at
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18 More information about UCLA’s Holistic Evaluation of Teaching HET project is available at https://teaching.ucla.edu/programs/holistic-evaluation-of-teaching/
the course level. It is the culture of the academic unit that acts as the starting point for increasing inclusion and fostering a welcoming environment at all levels. These units can then work to improve curriculum so that it is based on learning goals and provides equitable and effective pathways for students to achieve these goals.
Conclusion 6.1: Academic units hold collective responsibility for ensuring that (a) educators working under their auspices have the resources and supports they need to provide equitable and effective undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning experiences, and (b) all learning experiences they oversee, including courses, laboratories, field experiences, research experiences, and prerequisite and other requirements for programs and majors, provide equitable and effective STEM learning experiences for students.
Conclusion 6.2: Making science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instruction equitable and effective requires support and guidance from academic units and institutions in ways that balance instructors’ autonomy with the goal of providing high-quality learning experiences in STEM for all students.
Conclusion 6.3: Academic units play a major role in decisions and policies about teaching, including how teaching is valued, recognized, evaluated, and rewarded. Academic unit decisions and policies related to teaching can impede or promote the implementation of equitable and effective teaching strategies.
Conclusion 6.4: Barriers to students’ success can arise from the structure of course offerings and requirements. Students are often expected to take a sequence of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses, but the connections between the courses are often not well coordinated, and the overall goals for what students will learn across the sequence are not always well articulated.
Conclusion 6.5: Focused attention on examining and improving the coherence of learning goals across course sequences, programs, and majors can (a) help educators clarify the overall goals for students and facilitate improvements in individual courses, (b) facilitate alignment to the Principles for Equitable and Effective Instruction, (c) increase transparency and improve student outcomes, and (d) provide a means to collect data to assess the impact of curricular changes.