Novel Graduated Engagement Strategy Tools for Enhancing Student Success in a Large Diverse Introductory Physiology Course

Abstract

In order to meet the need for both a STEM‐competent workforce, and a STEM‐literate electorate, efforts must be made to increase retention and performance of students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM, including women, low‐income students, and minority groups. Active learning strategies have been shown to narrow the achievement gap for many of these students, but the effects of specific strategies are relatively understudied. In addition, recent studies have shown improvements in student success in courses using alternative formats (e.g., flipped classes), although these gains may be due to the inherent inclusion of active learning, rather than a result of the flipped format itself. To address these questions, we are developing a novel active learning strategy, Graduated Engagement Tools (GET), that has multiple points for student engagement and utilizes (1) online and in‐class activities of increasing levels of Bloom's taxonomy and (2) directed metacognitive exercises to promote student self‐examination of strategies and motivations for learning. We are in the process of testing the general effectiveness of the GET strategy in an introductory physiology course with a very large (~1300), diverse student enrollment. Our initial focus is on improving content mastery and reducing failure rates. We will assess the effectiveness of these strategies across groups of students to measure differential effects on specific demographics of students. We also plan to investigate the effect of the GET strategy on self‐efficacy, or student's perceived ability to succeed; a metric shown to correlate with academic success and retention that is relatively low in students from groups historically underrepresented in STEM. These efforts are ongoing and we present examples of the GET activities, preliminary data showing high levels of student engagement and critical thinking, and a plan for creating and assessing a scalable and transferrable model for deploying these activities in both lecture and hybrid‐ / flipped‐classroom formats.