SEIRI personnel and faculty associates are available upon request to give a variety of talks, presentations, or workshops on topics related to institutional transformation and curriculum change. Any talk/presentation/workshop will also include discussion of research methods and results.
Institutional Transformation
- Forming a STEM Education Innovation and Research Institute
This presentation will describe the formation of an institute focused on advancing state of the art STEM education innovation, research, and practice at a premier urban research university in the US. Discussion will focus on some of the activities that have proven to be most successful in promoting faculty engagement with the institute.
- Designing and Implementing a Seed Grant Program to promote STEM Faculty Members’ DBER Literacy: Findings from an Internal Grant Program
The purpose of this talk is to explore the development of Discipline Based Education Research (DBER) literacy among STEM faculty at a large midwestern university via implementation of an internal seed grant program (SSG). DBER literacy enables faculty members to understand and apply evidence based instructional strategies to advance student learning. Thus, developing STEM faculty members’ DBER literacy is critical for improving STEM programs. In this talk, we present results from the outcomes of the SSG program. Namely, we report on how, through SSG participation, faculty increased their DBER literacy, as well as other distal program outcomes. These findings provide guidance to others offering similar programming.
- Designing and Implementing a Faculty Learning Community
This talk will explore the potential role that Faculty Learning Communities (FLC) can play in the transformation of courses, as well as departmental curriculum. This talk will cover best practices for the design and implementation of FLC curricula focused on the transformation of faculty courses and student learning. To do this, examples will be provided from FLC curriculum created for two projects: the Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection (ICELER) project at IU Indianapolis and the urban farm-situated Place-Based Experiential Learning (PBEL) project at Butler University and IU Indianapolis. These examples will help to illustrate that 1) FLCs have significant effects related to faculty learning, including the adoption of innovative educational approaches; and 2) FLCs provide opportunities for faculty to build supportive and critical academic structures, to express and direct their agency, to experience moments of productive tension, and to encounter, negotiate, and respond to transformation roadblocks.
- Building Interdisciplinary Collaborations
This talk will explore the role that interdisciplinary collaborations can play in implementing and researching educational interventions. It will cover ways in which centers can play an important role in building these types of collaborations, how they can positively impact the faculty and the disciplines involved as well as create transformative educational experiences for students. Examples will be provided of previous collaborations, how they were formed, the role of the individual faculty as well as the involved center and provide details on the outcomes of these collaborations as they relate to funding, faculty, and students.
Curriculum Change
- Pedagogies of Engagement
Problem-based learning (PBL), process-oriented guided inquiry learning (POGIL), and peer-led team learning (PLTL) represent three student-centered pedagogies in science that have received wide attention and NSF support. All are motivated by a call for change in the way we teach that fundamentally recognizes the way people learn. All have much to offer, but each has particular emphases and applicability. For faculty interested in adopting active-learning strategies, these pedagogies provide a rich array of options, but may generate confusion due to their mix of shared and contrasting features. This presentation will describe, compare, and contrast the characteristics of these three pedagogies with the recognition that each is evolving in practice and that hybridization among them and with other approaches occurs frequently.
- Development of Cyber Peer Led Team Learning (PLTL), an Online Adaptation of PLTL
This presentation will describe the development of cPLTL which is the adaptation of Peer-Led Team Learning (PLTL) to an online format. PLTL is a model of teaching that preserves the lecture and replaces recitation (which is typically led by a graduate TA) in science courses with a weekly two-hour peer-led problem-solving session. During these interactive sessions (workshops), six to eight students work as a team to solve carefully constructed problems under the guidance of a peer leader. cPLTL allows students and peer leaders to take advantage of the PLTL model away from campus. This was important when classes had to be taught online during COVID lockdown. Findings from a study comparing PLTL and cPLTL will also be discussed.
- Computational Thinking Across the Curriculum
This talk introduces a project that aims to normalize computational methods, i.e. for students to see computational methods as a normal way to approach physics problems, rather than as an unusual technique limited to use by specialists or for narrowly defined problems. Through computational interventions, students gain the confidence to use computation routinely, and to develop judgement as to which problems may be solved analytically, which require numerical methods, and how the interplay between these techniques can be fruitful. At IU Indianapolis, we have infused every course in the physics undergraduate program with computational methods. This talk stresses the change process in the department, major decisions taken, internal and external resources that have supported our efforts, assessment plans, and preliminary results. This talk also shares lessons learned from the individual assignment scale to the overall curricular level. Issues including vertical integration of the curriculum, choice of computational platform, and assessment will be addressed.
- Geo-Equity Modules (GEMS)
This talk will introduce Geo-Equity Modules (GEMs) and identify what GEMs are, how they are created, and how they are implemented. GEMs are classroom activities centered around real-life case studies involving environmental problems with intrinsic ethical and equity-related issues. Each GEM is created collaboratively by a team of graduate and undergraduate students (GEM Scholars) and faculty. The activities are then used in a variety of introductory Earth Science courses as tools to foster constructive dialogue and raise awareness among students about the connections between human actions, environmental repercussions, and the disproportionately negative effects on historically marginalized groups. GEMs were specifically designed to mitigate barriers that may prevent some instructors from incorporating ethics and equity into their courses. They can be implemented in one class period, so they don’t require a large time commitment. They complement a range of geoscience course content and therefore can be used throughout the curriculum with minimal prep time. Lastly, they operate as in a “flipped” class – students do pre-class work in order to participate in group discussions and collaborative decision making during the class period, followed by individual reflections.
- Integrating Applied Ethics Across STEM Curriculum
This talk will explore the potential for a shift in how ethics is taught in higher education STEM contexts using examples from the Integrated Community-Engaged Learning and Ethical Reflection (ICELER) project at IU Indianapolis. Ethics education in STEM tends to rely heavily on the teaching of codes, rules, and standards. Ethics case studies, as well as discussions and debates, are also often employed. This leaves ethics in STEM as primarily a cognitive task for students. However, ethics is arguably more concerned with relationality, practice, and reflectivity. Experiential, place-based, and community-engaged approaches provide instructors with the blueprints for constructing educational environments that cultivate ethical development through practice. Taking such approaches opens opportunities for students to identify needs and problems for which they can utilize their STEM knowledge and skills to address. This talk also explores possibilities for teaching STEM as a mode of ethical inquiry into the addressing of social ills.
- Assessing the Outcomes of an Instructional Intervention
This talk will introduce participants to different ways of quantitatively and/or qualitatively assessing the impacts of an instructional intervention they have implemented in their teaching and learning environment. Understanding the impacts of an instructional intervention is an important part of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SOTL). Specifically, student level outcomes are important for program enhancements as well as program replication. This talk will discuss different methodologies for collecting student level outcome data, understanding the findings, and selecting appropriate instrumentation. Additionally, data collection techniques, including methods to get student participation will be reviewed. Finally, the talk will discuss a wide array of possibilities for the dissemination of findings through peer-reviewed journals and conference presentations.
- Measurement in STEM Education: Finding the Right Instrument
This talk will explore how to identify quantitative instruments that faculty can use to measure student education outcomes, specifically measures related to attitudes, learning dispositions, affective dimensions, belonging, identity, etc. Such measures can provide a richness to one’s educational studies; however, it can be difficult to know how to identify quality instruments. This talk will provide the principles of identifying what one wants to measure, how to look for such a measure, and how to evaluate the validity and reliability evidence of that measure. If, after a thorough search, no appropriate measures are identified, then a new instrument may need to be created. This talk will close by providing an overview of how one could go about designing and validating a new instrument.
