A professional learning community in which faculty explored equitable teaching online is described. This article describes concrete practices other instructors can use.
This article investigates the implementation of inquiry-oriented instruction in 20 undergraduate mathematics classrooms. In contrast to conventional wisdom that active learning is good for all students, we found gendered performance differences between women and men in the inquiry classes that were not present in a noninquiry comparison sample. Through a secondary analysis of classroom videos, we linked these performance inequities to differences in women’s participation rates across classes. Thus, we provide empirical evidence that simply implementing active learning is insufficient, and that the nature of inquiry-oriented classrooms is highly consequential for improving gender equity in mathematics.
This paper explores the intersections of Students as Partners (SaP) and identity development. While identity and sense of belonging are known to be key factors for predicting success and persistence in STEM, less is known about how student partnerships can provide space for students to develop their identities. To explore this space, we focus on the Access Network, a coalition funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) of student-run programs that aims to improve equity in the physical sciences. Qualitative interviews with six student participants showed how SaP created opportunities for students to develop social justice physics identities, which allowed them to bridge traditional notions of what it means to be a physicist with their own social justice commitments. This paper contributes to the rapidly growing SaP literature by studying student partnerships at the scale of a national network of institutions, which contrasts studies that focus on more localized contexts, such as teaching and learning in a single classroom.
This article describes how a focus on outcomes can be a tool for guiding systemic change. By focusing on positive outcomes to be achieved, a group can guide its collective efforts toward an ideal future rather than becoming fixated on individual problems to solve. While there is support for an outcome-guided approach in the literature on individual and organizational change, this approach has not been used extensively to support department-level changes in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education.
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