Empowering faculty to initiate STEM education transformation: Efficacy of a systems thinking approach

Abstract

Just a decade ago Vision and Change in Undergraduate Biology Education: A Call to Action was released, catalyzing several initiatives to transform undergraduate life sciences education. Among these was the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE), a national organization commissioned to increase the adoption of Vision and Change recommendations within academic life sciences departments. PULSE activities have been designed based on the recognition that life sciences departments and faculty are embedded within institutions of higher education which, similar to other large organizations, are complex systems composed of multiple, interconnected subsystems. The organizational change research suggests that effecting large-scale changes (e.g., undergraduate STEM education transformation) may be facilitated by applying systems thinking to change efforts. In this paper we introduce the approach of systems thinking as a professional development tool to empower individual STEM faculty to effect department-level transformation. We briefly describe a professional development experience designed to increase life sciences faculty members’ understanding of systems thinking, present evidence that faculty applied a systems thinking approach to initiate department-level change, and discuss the degree to which transformation efforts were perceived to be successful. Though focused on faculty in the life sciences, our findings are broadly transferable to other efforts seeking to effect change in undergraduate STEM education.

A Systems Thinking Approach Toward Meaningful Program Assessment

“…Orgill states that systems thinking is an "approach for examining and addressing complex behaviors and phenomena from a more holistic perspective" and that systems thinking approaches: 1) identify interactions between a system and its environment; 2) recognize a system as a whole and not just a collection of parts; 3) examine relationships between the parts of a system; 4) examine how system behaviors change over time; and 5) identify variables that cause system behaviors (Orgill et al, 2019). The notion of assessment systems being greater than a collection of their separate parts has been in place for some time (Birnbaum & Edelson, 1989;Kuh, 1996aKuh, , 1996b, with Jankowski and Marshall providing a recent example of a systems thinking approach to assessment in their Learning Systems Paradigm (LSP) and Stavrianeas et al describing how PULSE uses systems thinking in their workshops to enable faculty as change agents in revisioning STEM curricula (Stavrianeas et al 2022). In this section, we describe how a program can reflect and operationally define the components of its institutional system and how the program fits within the larger whole.…”

“…To emulate the hallmark successes of the Vision and Change initiative, this paper describes a systems thinking approach to develop a learner-centered program assessment system that achieves NILOAs' principles, works within a larger institutional assessment system, and draws data from course assignment scores. The application of systems thinking principles to enable faculty as curricular change agents (Stavrianeas et al 2022) has been described recently by authors involved with the Partnership for Undergraduate Life Sciences Education (PULSE; specifically the Northwest Regional Network). A systemsthinking paradigm for approaching biology instruction was recently posed by Momsen et al (2022) Systems thinking provides a mechanism to define how assessment in a course, program, or institution integrate with one another and define the purpose of a particular assessment.…”

Prioritization of the concepts and skills in quantitative education for graduate students in biomedical science

“…In general, there has been more explicit guidance and study of how to incorporate quantitative skills into undergraduate biology programs [ 1 , 3 , 7 – 11 ] than there has been at the graduate level. Along with general guidance for graduate STEM education [ 12 ], studies have emphasized the differences in graduate quantitative training between medical programs and mathematical biology [ 13 ] and suggestions for integrating particular quantitative topics in biology graduate education [ 14 , 15 ].…”

Themes in molecular life science education: Engaging pedagogies and faculty development for student success

“…10 Finally, Dr Erin Dolan and Dr Erika Offerdahl have been champions of applying education research to active learning in the classroom to reach all types of students. 11 Faculty development of pedagogical strategies and educational research topics is becoming increasingly collaborative, especially through NSF-supported RCN-UBE and DUE grants. Some of the programs supported include MDH CUREs group (NSF Award # 2119918), CRISPR-Cas9 group (NSF Award # 2120417), BASIL group (NSF Award # 1503811), MolecularCaseNet (NSF Award # 2018884), ICABL Assessment group (NSF Award # 2120673), BioMolViz (NSF Award # 1712268 and 1920270) and CURE.net (NSF Award 1061874 and 1730273).…”

“…This approach has been particularly successful in helping students who face social and economic challenges growing up; Dr. Davis's work and those of others have shown that the growth mindset approach significantly decreases stereotypes and the threats it poses to student learning 10 . Finally, Dr Erin Dolan and Dr Erika Offerdahl have been champions of applying education research to active learning in the classroom to reach all types of students 11 …”