Abstract
This article examines the ways that a shared faculty experience across five partner institutions led to a deep awareness of the curriculum and pedagogy of general chemistry coursework, and ultimately, to a collaborative action plan for student success. The team identified key differences and similarities in course content and instructional experiences. The comparative analysis yielded many more similarities than differences, and therefore, the team shifted its focus from “gap analysis” to an exploration of common curricular challenges. To address these challenges, the team developed content for targeted instructional resources that promoted the success of all STEM students across institutions. This article contextualizes the interinstitutional collaboration and closely examines the interactive components (awareness, analysis, and action), critical tools, and productive attitudes that undergirded the curricular alignment process of the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative (t-STEM).
Highlights
The twin agendas of increasing college completion and developing STEM competencies for a growing marketplace prompted a new urgency in higher education.[1]
The team developed a set of inventory and analytic tools that are applicable to other disciplines and institutions, and can be modified for specific contexts. These tools have already been used and adapted by a mathematics curricular alignment team composed of faculty members from the same institutional partners
Though preliminary data show that retention and graduation rates have improved for STEM transfer students (2012−2015), the campus-wide efforts make it difficult to tease out the particular impact, if any, of a relatively small chemistry team, or even the broader the STEM Transfer Student Success Initiative (t-STEM) Initiative
Summary
The twin agendas of increasing college completion and developing STEM competencies for a growing marketplace prompted a new urgency in higher education.[1]. 53.0 provides UMBC institutional comparative data of the Drop/ Fail/Withdraw rates (DFW) in chemistry courses for full-time freshmen (FTF) and transfer students from Fall 2009 to Spring 2011 (see Table 1) These data were even more compelling in the context of national discussions around retention and degree completion among STEM undergraduates.[1,3] Out of these data-driven discussions, the team acknowledged the need for academic improvement among students from all partner institutions, and chose to focus its work on the general chemistry sequence. The team developed, refined, and utilized three inventory-based tools for collecting and documenting course-related information (see Table 2)
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