The disparity between post-secondary STEM instruction and the practices suggested in education and cognitive research is not a novel issue. Despite evidence-based practices being available to practitioners, traditional lecture-based instruction continues to dominate higher STEM education. In this study, we discussed practitioner involvement in biochemistry education research as a potential means to address the gap between research and practice. We used phenomenology as a lens through which to view faculty experiences of participating in a team-based curricular redesign. We administered a concept inventory to examine undergraduate students’ understanding of key concepts and to identify misconceptions. We captured faculty perspectives and reflections on student data through semi-structured interviews, finding that faculty dissatisfaction with traditional practices were rooted in experiences from early on in their teaching careers. Their students demonstrated a lack of conceptual understanding, similar to findings of other studies in undergraduate biochemistry, and key misconceptions the student population held were identified. When examining students’ conceptual understanding data, the faculty gained new insights into where students struggle in the course that they would not have gained without participation in this project. This reinforced their desire to implement curricular change. These findings add to the available data on students’ conceptual understanding in biochemistry and suggest that shared assessments like concept inventories can unify instructors as they engage in team-based curricular reform.
We investigated how changing the physical classroom impacted graduate teaching assistant (GTA) and student behaviors in tutorial sections of an introductory algebra-based physics sequence. Using a modified version of the Laboratory Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (LOPUS), we conducted 35 observations over two semesters for seven GTAs who taught in different styles of classrooms (i.e., active learning classrooms and traditional classrooms). We found that both GTAs and students changed behaviors in response to a change from an active learning classroom to a traditional classroom. GTAs were found to be less interactive with student groups and to lecture at the whiteboard more frequently. Correspondingly, student behaviors changed as students asked fewer questions during one-on-one interactions. These findings suggest that the instructional capacity framework, which typically focuses on interactions between instructors, students and instructional materials, should also include interactions with the learning space. We suggest administrators and departments consider the impact of changing to a traditional classroom when implementing student-centered instruction and emphasize how to use classroom space in GTA professional development.
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