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Enhancing STEM Education at Oregon State University – Year 1

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Conference

2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Seattle, Washington

Publication Date

June 14, 2015

Start Date

June 14, 2015

End Date

June 17, 2015

ISBN

978-0-692-50180-1

ISSN

2153-5965

Conference Session

NSF Grantees’ Poster Session

Tagged Topic

NSF Grantees Poster Session

Page Count

12

Page Numbers

26.664.1 - 26.664.12

DOI

10.18260/p.24002

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/24002

Download Count

490

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Paper Authors

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Milo Koretsky Oregon State University

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Milo Koretsky is a Professor of Chemical Engineering at Oregon State University. He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees from UC San Diego and his Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, all in Chemical Engineering. He currently has research activity in areas related engineering education and is interested in integrating technology into effective educational practices and in promoting the use of higher-level cognitive skills in engineering problem solving. His research interests particularly focus on what prevents students from being able to integrate and extend the knowledge developed in specific courses in the core curriculum to the more complex, authentic problems and projects they face as professionals. Dr. Koretsky is one of the founding members of the Center for Lifelong STEM Education Research at OSU.

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Jana Bouwma-Gearhart Oregon State University

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Jana L. Bouwma-Gearhart is an associate professor of STEM education at Oregon State University. Her research widely concerns improving education at research universities. Her earlier research explored enhancements to faculty motivation to improve undergraduate education. Her more recent research concerns organizational change towards postsecondary STEM education improvement at research universities, including the interactions of levers (people, organizations, policy, initiatives) of change and documenting the good, hard work required across disciplinary boundaries to achieve meaningful change in STEM education.

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Shane A. Brown P.E. Oregon State University Orcid 16x16 orcid.org/0000-0003-3669-8407

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Shane Brown is an associate professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. His research interests include conceptual change and situated cognition. He received the NSF CAREER award in 2010 and is working on a study to characterize practicing engineers’ understandings of core engineering concepts.

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Thomas Dick Oregon State University

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Thomas Dick is a professor of mathematics at Oregon State University. He serves as the Coordinator of Collegiate Mathematics Education, as Faculty Director of the OSU Math Learning Center, and as the OSU Math Excel (Treisman Emerging Scholars) program. His main mathematics education research interests are in the use of technology to enhance teaching and learning of mathematics. He was recognized in 2009 with the Pacific Northwest Section of the Mathematical Association of America Distinguished Teaching Award. He most recently served on an Equity Task Force for the Association of Mathematics Teacher Educators.

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Susie J Brubaker-Cole Oregon State University

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Dr. Susie Brubaker-Cole is vice provost for student affairs at Oregon State University. Prior to this appointment, she served for six years as OSU's associate provost for academic success and eight years as Stanford's associate vice provost for undergraduate education. She earned her bachelors' degrees in French and Comparative History of Ideas from University of Washington, and master's and doctoral degrees from Yale in French literature. She is interested in student perceptions of innovative pedagogies and course designs, and the impact of co-curricular engagement on student success.

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Ann Sitomer Oregon State University

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Ann earned a PhD in mathematics education from Portland State University in 2014. Her dissertation examined the informal ways of reasoning about ratio, rate and proportion that adult returning students bring to an arithmetic review class and how these ways of thinking interacted with the curriculum. Other research interests include teachers’ professional noticing of learners’ mathematical thinking and organizational change. Ann works on both the implementation and research sides of the ESTEME@OSU project.

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Kathleen Quardokus Fisher Oregon State University

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Dr. Kathleen Quardokus Fisher is a post doctoral scholar at Oregon State University. She is currently participating in a project that supports the use of evidence-based instructional practices in undergraduate STEM courses through developing communities of practice. Her research interests focus on understanding how organizational change occurs in higher education with respect to teaching and learning in STEM courses.

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Julie Risien Oregon State University

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Julie is the Associate Director of the the Oregon State University Center for Research on Lifelong STEM Learning. In this role she focuses on investigating and enhancing the quality of research impacts, working to redefine undergraduate success, and working across campus to support transformation of undergraduate STEM education practices. Julie brings experience working with research organizations at OSU including Oregon Sea Grant and the Institute for Natural Resources. Prior to her work as research administrator Julie spent many years working for non-profit organizations and as a U.S. Peace Corps Volunteer on marine conservation issues including state and regional research planning and policy initiatives, citizen-science water quality monitoring and enforcement, marine habitat restoration, marine reserves establishment and monitoring, endangered species conservation and management, and community-based conservation programing in the Pacific Islands. Julie has a MSc. in Marine Resource Management from OSU. She serves as an advisor to the office of research development, and serves on the National Alliance for Broader Impacts steering committee.

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David L. Little II Oregon State University

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Dr. Little is a post-doc scholar at Oregon State University and a graduate of the STEM Education program at the University of Kentucky. He specializes in education measurement across the STEM disciplines, sustainability education at the post-secondary level, and interdisciplinary research and teaching within the STEM disciplines.

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Christina Smith Oregon State University

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Christina Smith is a graduate student in the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering at Oregon State University. She received her B.S. from the University of Utah in chemical engineering and is pursuing her Ph.D. also in chemical engineering with an emphasis on engineering education. Her research interests include undergraduate and graduate student personal epistemology as well as diffusion of innovations.

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john David ivanovitch Oregon State university

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I am a third year doctoral student studying organizational change and science education at the collegiate level. My education includes a BA in cell and molecular Biology and a MSc. in integrated biochemistry/microbiology. Prior to entering the Doctoral program at Oregon State University I worked for over a decade as a biomedical researcher, with projects ranging from biochemistry to molecular virology. My current education research interests include transdisciplinary integration of STEM, and teaching-related cultures at the micro-, meso- and macro levels (i.e., discipline, departmental, institutional).

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Abstract

Enhancing STEM Education at University XYZ – Year 1Development and implementation of innovative instructional practices are currently underway incourses in many STEM programs at University XYZ. Not surprisingly, they tend to be largelysequestered within a discipline, target different, specific elements, and are at varying stages ofimplementation. However University XYZ is witnessing elements of transdisciplinarycollaboration emerging. The ESTEME@XYZ Program presents an opportunity to catalyze broadinstitutional change through scaling and cross-pollination of efforts utilizing two evidence-basedinstructional practices (EBIPs), interactive engagement with frequent formative feedback andformal cooperative learning, in targeted classes in five STEM departments (biology, chemistry,engineering, mathematics, and physics). Project EBIPs are based on an interactive lectureenvironment combined with a studio workshop-based cooperative recitation environment;targeted outcomes are students’ well-connected conceptual knowledge structures and abilities tonon-linearly and iteratively solve problems utilizing conceptual understanding. The courses wehave initially selected for implementation of EBIPs are the calculus-based introductory courses.Normalizing effort across these courses ensures that there will be opportunities for students tohave multiple synergistic experiences (especially in years 1 and 2) early in demanding STEMmajors.Our efforts are based on a strategic interaction of socio-cultural and cognitive theories oforganizational change (communities of practice, social capital and diffusion of innovations,organizational learning), impacts on individual learning (conceptual change regarding cognitiveschemas, motivation, self-efficacy, social resources), and evidence based pedagogical practices(interactive engagement, frequent formative feedback, and formal cooperative learning, andresponsive formative assessment).We use communities of practice (CoP) as the primary mechanism for implementation andscaling of EBIPs. CoPs will be directed towards two areas (i) curricular development and (ii)instructional practice. In the first area, CoPs allow faculty who have been independentlydeveloping and implementing similar innovative instructional practices to regularize acrossdepartments. This activity supports further development – allowing innovators to borrow fromone another and to collectively address problems they cannot solve independently. In the secondarea, CoPs permit faculty and student instructors to explicitly address and negotiate an essentialtension: developing one’s skill in instruction requires an educator to deepen her/hisunderstanding and metacognition concerning what she/he is teaching (disciplinary content) andhow she/he is teaching it (instructional strategies). In both these areas, the CoPs facilitateevolving relationships amongst members developed around things that matter. Our approach isbased on the premise that in the inclusion of three interacting elements - (i) using community-agreed upon EBIPs; (ii) while working to increase scale, and (iii) learning about what other unitsare doing and how they are doing it through CoPs - we have components for emergentorganizational change.This poster presentation reports on Year 1 of this project.

Koretsky, M., & Bouwma-Gearhart, J., & Brown, S. A., & Dick, T., & Brubaker-Cole, S. J., & Sitomer, A., & Quardokus Fisher, K., & Risien, J., & Little, D. L., & Smith, C., & ivanovitch, J. D. (2015, June), Enhancing STEM Education at Oregon State University – Year 1 Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24002

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