Abstract
BackgroundThe undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community has developed a large number of innovative teaching strategies and materials, but the majority of these go unused by instructors. To help understand how to improve adoption of evidence-based education innovations, this study focuses on innovations that have become widely used in college-level STEM instruction. Innovations were identified via a questionnaire emailed to experts in STEM instruction. Descriptions of identified innovations were validated by preparing brief descriptions of each innovation and sending them to the original developers, when applicable, for feedback, and searching relevant literature. Publicly available funding data was collected for each innovation. STEM disciplines surveyed include biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, geoscience, mathematics, and physics.ResultsThe 43 innovations identified were categorized based on two criteria: level of specificity (general, recognizable, branded) and type of change (pedagogical, content, both, neither). The 21 branded innovations were analyzed in more detail. The majority (14/21) require relatively modest changes in pedagogy and no changes in content. In addition, nearly all have received at least 3 million dollars in external funding over at least 10 years.ConclusionsThis paper presents the full list of instructional innovations produced, which can be used by educational innovation developers to understand how their ideas fit within the broader landscape and to identify innovations in one discipline that may have promise for transfer. The findings regarding funding of the branded innovations have important implications for both educational innovation developers and funding agencies. In particular, the study indicates that a long-term mindset and access to long-term funding are vital for broad adoption of new teaching innovations.
Highlights
The undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community has developed a large number of innovative teaching strategies and materials, but the majority of these go unused by instructors
We present the results of this study in two parts: (1) the final list of all 43 Well-propagated instructional strategy or material (WePISM) and (2) a more detailed analysis of the 21 branded innovations for which there was additional publically available data
Identification of disciplines mentioning an innovation was only based on the email surveys of experts, not additional searches of the literature, examples may be found in literature of WePISMs crossing over into other disciplines
Summary
The undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community has developed a large number of innovative teaching strategies and materials, but the majority of these go unused by instructors. Technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines, significant education research has focused on developing teaching innovations and evaluating their efficacy (National Research Council 2012). This research has produced many new instructional strategies and teaching materials that have been shown to improve a variety of student-learning outcomes Most of these strategies are not widely used by STEM instructors (Austin 2011, Seymour, 2001, Fairweather 2008). The limited use of these strategies suggests that we lack a coherent framework for implementing widespread reform in college STEM teaching This has been an active research area in recent years (D’Avanzo 2013; Gannaway et al 2011; Kezar 2011; Litzinger et al 2011; Mckenna, Froyd, & Litzinger, 2014)
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