Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM instructional practices: An analytic review of the literature

Abstract

This article reviews current scholarship about how to promote change in instructional practices used in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. The review is based on 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles published between 1995 and 2008. Four broad categories of change strategies were developed to capture core differences within this body of literature: disseminating curriculum and pedagogy, developing reflective teachers, enacting policy, and developing shared vision. STEM education researchers largely write about change in terms of disseminating curriculum and pedagogy. Faculty development researchers largely write about change in terms of developing reflective teachers. Higher education researchers largely write about change in terms of enacting policy. New work often does not build on prior empirical or theoretical work. Although most articles claim success of the change strategy studied, evidence presented to support these claims is typically not strong. For example, only 21% of articles that studied implementation of a change strategy were categorized as presenting strong evidence to support claims of success or failure of the strategy. These analyses suggest that the state of change strategies and the study of change strategies are weak, and that research communities that study and enact change are largely isolated from one‐another. In spite of the weak state of the literature, some conclusions related to the design of change strategies can be drawn from this review. Two commonly used change strategies are clearly not effective: developing and testing “best practice” curricular materials and then making these materials available to other faculty and “top‐down” policy‐making meant to influence instructional practices. Effective change strategies: are aligned with or seek to change the beliefs of the individuals involved; involve long‐term interventions, lasting at least one semester; require understanding a college or university as a complex system and designing a strategy that is compatible with this system. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 952–984, 2011

Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics

“…Although traditional lecturing has dominated undergraduate instruction for most of a millennium and continues to have strong advocates (29), current evidence suggests that a constructivist "ask, don't tell" approach may lead to strong increases in student performance-amplifying recent calls from policy makers and researchers to support faculty who are transforming their undergraduate STEM courses (5,30).…”

Use of research-based instructional strategies in introductory physics: Where do faculty leave the innovation-decision process?

“…While it may be possible to foresee implementation difficulties and provide faculty with additional advice before they begin to use a RBIS, it is almost certain that additional support during initial use will lead to more successful use. One important finding from a literature review on change strategies in higher education is that successful strategies provide support during implementation in the form of performance evaluation and feedback [87]. In current dissemination strategies, support and feedback during implementation are quite rare.…”

Response strategies for curriculum change in engineering

“…These isolated cases of changes in courses represent an important stage for seeking a more general model, but it illustrates that the research in this area is more empirical and case based and has hardly been conceptualised into more theoretical and model driven approaches. Henderson et al (2011) is one of the core references, in all articles except two, and forms the theoretical framework for the analysis of the work in several of the articles (Henderson et al 2011). These authors have reviewed the literature on ''how to promote change in instructional practices used in undergraduate science, technology, and mathematics (STEM) courses''.…”

“…1 Overview and conceptual underpinnings of the four categories of change strategies. Acronyms in the figure: SER disciplinary-based STEM education researchers, FDR faculty development researchers, HER higher education researchers) (Henderson et al 2011) widespread change of the organisation and of the curriculum (Goldberg and Sommerville 2014). Furthermore, this model is used for characterising core change strategies; however, in the literature, the four strategies are not described as scalable or as interacting in a whole of system approach.…”