Characteristics of well-propagated undergraduate STEM teaching innovations

Abstract

The science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education communities have developed many innovative teaching strategies and learning materials in the past few decades. While these innovations have significant promise for improving undergraduate STEM education they commonly go unused by other STEM instructors. This study is an inquiry into the relatively small number of teaching innovations that have become widely used in college-level STEM disciplines. The disciplines include biology, chemistry, computer science, engineering, geoscience, mathematics, and physics. The successfully propagated innovations were identified via experts in each discipline and were validated through member checking and searches of relevant literature. Short descriptions of each innovation were developed and, when applicable, sent to the original developer for feedback, and publically-available funding data was collected. In this paper we focus on the “branded” innovations—innovations with a central leadership and core set of practices. Many of these originated in physics, and the majority focus on changes in pedagogy, not content. In addition, most have received funding for at least ten years. These commonalities have implications for the structure of current funding models and the ease of implementing changes in content.