Reaching Students What Research Says About Effective Instruction in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (2015) / Chapter Skim
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6 Overcoming Challenges
6 Overcoming Challenges
Pages 153-174
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From page 153... ...
As in sci entific research or engineering design, the best response to the inevitable stumble or obstacle is not to give up but to reflect on what you can do better, make adjust ments, and persist. "Be patient," advises Alex Rudolph,1 a physics and astronomy professor at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
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From page 154... ...
Common Challenges to Broader Implementation Studies of faculty adoption of instructional innovations and surveys of instruc tional practices in science and engineering have identified several factors that instructors often perceive as obstacles to using more research-based practices (for example, Henderson and Dancy, 2011; Jacobson, Davis, and Licklider, 1998; Knight and Wood, 2005) : • Time involved in learning about new strategies and redesigning courses • Concerns about ensuring that students are taught important content • Concerns about students' reactions to an unfamiliar teaching method and the impact on student course evaluations • Concerns that a different strategy will not work as well, especially if it impacts tenure 3 Interview, April 29, 2013.
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From page 155... ...
suggest that about one-third of the faculty who try at least one research-based strategy abandon their reform efforts, often when they are confronted with implementation challenges, such as student complaints, concerns about losing important content, or weaker than expected student outcomes. In addition, faculty members frequently modify a research-based strategy to suit their needs -- a reasonable reaction, but one that can compromise effectiveness if the modifications omit elements that are critical to the strategy's success.
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From page 156... ...
"The thing that transforms a department is not the department but the faculty in the department," says Eric Brewe,4 a physics professor at Florida International University. "If I'm a department chair and I want to change the way my faculty teach, [I]
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A final section suggests ways in which individual instructors can help to create a departmental or an institutional culture that fosters research-based innovations in teaching and learning. Broader challenges that require actions from departments or institutions, such as those related to tenure, departmental expectations, class size, and schedul ing, are addressed in Chapter 7.
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From page 158... ...
The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at UBC and a sister initiative at the University of Colorado Boulder provide science education specialists to help faculty with course transformation. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, graduate student interns in the Delta Program in Research, Teaching, and Learning serve as "capacity building for faculty," says Don Gillian-Daniel,7 the program's associate director, by help ing faculty create research-based instructional materials.
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From page 159... ...
Several instructors interviewed for this book worked with one or more colleagues to redesign a course, and in some cases they decided to co-teach or team teach that course. Part of the UBC/Colorado Science Education Initiative involved doing away with the "glaring example of inefficiency [of]
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"[R] ather than worry What really matters is how about cramming more material into an already bloated much content students actually curriculum, it would be best to focus on teaching a few of the major concepts/principles well in order to help students learn, not how much content an see ‘the big picture,'" writes Jose Mestre (2008, p.
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From page 161... ...
When Mark Leckie8 and Richard Yuretich redesigned their oceanogra phy course to make it more interactive, "it forced us to really identify the abso lutely important things" that they wanted students to learn, says Leckie. This was a "refreshing" exercise that made it possible for them to devote class time to interactive learning, he adds.
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. At institutions where student course evaluations play a role in assessing and retaining instructors, instructors may fear that trying new approaches will lower their good evaluation results.
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have documented improvements in student course evaluations after the adoption of research-based teaching practices. At North Carolina State University, students who took a first-semester physics class taught using the Student-Centered Active Learning Environment with Upside down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP)
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Some instructors share evidence with their students of increased learning among students in research-based classes. Karl Wirth,12 a geosciences professor at Macalester College, shows students lists of the skills that employers want and how those correlate with the activities they will do in his class.
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After a few years of teaching a SCALE UP biology course, Wright noticed that students who had previously taken the course were succeeding in upper-division courses, including courses taught in a more traditional way. Eventually, she says, the upper-division students tell the lower-division students, "You're going to work your butt off, you're going to be really frustrated sometimes, but it's really worth it because it will prepare you well for what you're going to do next." Undergraduate learning assistants and graduate teaching assistants who have helped to facilitate student-centered class es can also spread the word about the benefits of this approach.
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plus students, most of whom are majoring in biology Then the students vote again on the correct answer. or health care fields like nursing, pre-med, or physical Students also work on more demanding prob therapy.
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. Despite her efforts to prepare students from the beginning about how the class operates and why she teaches as she does, some students have difficulty adapting.
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He began reading more of the physics education research literature. Next he took a course in theories of learning from Valerie Otero, a faculty member in the School of Education at his university.
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In the "situated apprenticeship" workshops offered by Prather, director of the Center for Astronomy Education, participants receive feedback as they practice implementing research-based strategies in a simulated classroom environment. In this way, faculty gain a better understanding of the kinds of challenges that they and their students will face in a more interactive classroom.
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From page 170... ...
class, a colleague who critiques the implementation, The goal is to promote real change in instructional or critiquers of the Think-Pair-Share question itself. practices and skills by evoking and examining par- This process enables participants to see firsthand ticipants' ideas about implementation of a particular the kinds of errors that instructors commonly make instructional strategy.
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From page 171... ...
Since its inception in 2004, the Center for Astronomy Education has provided comprehen sive, multi-day professional development to more than 2,200 astronomy and space science instructors, post-docs, graduate students, and other profession als. The workshops are jointly funded by NASA's Participants who have attended other workshops Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the National Science on Think-Pair-Share report that after attending the Foundation (NSF)
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From page 172... ...
While research evidence about increased student learning can be persuasive, colleagues often have a major influence on whether instructors use an instructional innovation: two-thirds of the faculty surveyed by Henderson and Dancy reported learning about an innovation through a colleague. Based on her current work on innovative strategies in materials science engi neering courses, Cindy Waters14 asserts that instructors are more likely to see the value of changing their teaching if others in their faculty peer group also value that effort.
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From page 173... ...
Collecting evidence of the impact of your efforts is an important part of research-based teaching and learning and can help to persuade some other instructors of its value. David Sokoloff,15 a professor at the University of Oregon who leads workshops on physics education, acknowledges that while it is not always easy to convince other faculty to consider research-based approaches, the evidence is a natural starting point.
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From page 174... ...
Chapter 7 pro vides several examples of ways in which departments, institutions, and other entities can initiate broader reforms to improve the effectiveness of undergraduate teaching and learning in science and engineering. Resources and Further Reading Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering (National Research Council, 2012)
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