Innovative Teaching Knowledge Stays with Users

Programs seeking to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses often strive for participating faculty to share their knowledge of innovative teaching practices with other faculty in their home departments. Here, we provide interview, survey, and social network analyses revealing that faculty who use innovative teaching practices preferentially talk to each other, suggesting that greater steps are needed for information about innovative practices to reach faculty more broadly

Development of the Cooperative Adoption Factors Instrument to Measure Factors Associated with Instructional Practice in the Context of Institutional Change

Background: Many institutional and departmentally focused change efforts have sought to improve teaching in STEM through the promotion of evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs). Even with these efforts, EBIPs have not become the predominant mode of teaching in many STEM departments. To better understand institutional change efforts and the barriers to EBIP implementation, we developed the Cooperative Adoption Factors Instrument (CAFI) to probe faculty member characteristics beyond demographic attributes at the individual level. The CAFI probes multiple constructs related to institutional change including perceptions of the degree of mutual advantage of taking an action (strategic complements), trust and interconnectedness among colleagues (interdependence), and institutional attitudes toward teaching (climate). Results: From data collected across five STEM fields at three large public research universities, we show that the CAFI has evidence of internal structure validity based on exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. The scales have low correlations with each other and show significant variation among our sampled universities as demonstrated by ANOVA. We further demonstrate a relationship between the strategic complements and climate factors with EBIP adoption through use of a regression analysis. In addition to these factors, we also find that indegree, a measure of opinion leadership, correlates with EBIP adoption. Conclusions: The CAFI uses the CACAO model of change to link the intended outcome of EBIP adoption with perception of EBIPs as mutually reinforcing (strategic complements), perception of faculty having their fates intertwined (interdependence), and perception of institutional readiness for change (climate). Our work has established that the CAFI is sensitive enough to pick up on differences between three relatively similar institutions and captures significant relationships with EBIP adoption. Our results suggest that the CAFI is likely to be a suitable tool to probe institutional change efforts, both for change agents who wish to characterize the local conditions on their respective campuses to support effective planning for a change initiative and for researchers who seek to follow the progression of a change initiative. While these initial findings are very promising, we also recommend that CAFI be administered in different types of institutions to examine the degree to which the observed relationships hold true across contexts

Real-World Industry Collaboration within a Mechatronics Class

This paper describes the implementation and assessment of an innovative senior/graduate level mechatronics (robotics) module that integrated structured and unstructured learning experiences, in collaboration with an industry partner. With real-world constraints and expectations, students designed and delivered a product as the final project. In fall 2007, the corporate partner provided state-of-the-art, programmable robotic kits with a user-friendly programming environment. The assigned project was to design a biomedical robot to work in a hospital intensive care unit (ICU) to perform tasks such as transporting supplies or delivering paperwork. Students with diverse skills and majors were grouped in ten teams, two to three students each. Student learning activities included designing a robot from a box of FisherTechnik materials, without the aid of instruction manuals; writing program code using the PCS environment; and integrating hardware and software. After four weeks of building, training, and testing, each team’s robot was unique. In the final competition, each robot was assigned to a particular room in the ICU to perform a specific task. Overall, the results indicated that the students gained hands-on experience with the state-of-art technology and effectively applied the conceptual course content to a real application

Social Networks and Instructional Reform in STEM: The Teaching-Research Nexus

Instructional reform in STEM aims for the widespread adoption of evidence based instructional practices (EBIPS), practices that implement active learning. Research recognizes that faculty social networks regarding discussion or advice about teaching may matter to such efforts. But teaching is not the only priority for university faculty – meeting research expectations is at least as important and, often, more consequential for tenure and promotion decisions. We see value in understanding how research networks, based on discussion and advice about research matters, relate to teaching networks to see if and how such networks could advance instructional reform efforts. Our research examines data from three departments (biology, chemistry, and geosciences) at three universities that had recently received funding to enhance adoption of EBIPs in STEM fields. We evaluate exponential random graph models of the teaching network and find that (a) the existence of a research tie from one faculty member i to another j enhances the prospects of a teaching tie from i to j, but (b) even though faculty highly placed in the teaching network are more likely to be extensive EBIP users, faculty highly placed in the research network are not, dimming prospects for leveraging research networks to advance STEM instructional reforms

Innovative teaching knowledge stays with users

Programs seeking to transform undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics courses often strive for participating faculty to share their knowledge of innovative teaching practices with other faculty in their home departments. Here, we provide interview, survey, and social network analyses revealing that faculty who use innovative teaching practices preferentially talk to each other, suggesting that greater steps are needed for information about innovative practices to reach faculty more broadly

Examining whether and how instructional coordination occurs within introductory undergraduate STEM courses

Instructors’ interactions can foster knowledge sharing around teaching and the use of research-based instructional strategies (RBIS). Coordinated teaching presents an impetus for instructors’ interactions and creates opportunities for instructional improvement but also potentially limits an instructor’s autonomy. In this study, we sought to characterize the extent of coordination present in introductory undergraduate courses and to understand how departments and instructors implement and experience course coordination. We examined survey data from 3,641 chemistry, mathematics, and physics instructors at three institution types and conducted follow-up interviews with a subset of 24 survey respondents to determine what types of coordination existed, what factors led to coordination, how coordination constrained instruction, and how instructors maintained autonomy within coordinated contexts. We classified three approaches to coordination at both the overall course and course component levels: independent (i.e., not coordinated), collaborative (decisionmaking by instructor and others), controlled (decision-making by others, not instructor). Two course components, content coverage and textbooks, were highly coordinated. These curricular components were often decided through formal or informal committees, but these decisions were seldom revisited. This limited the ability for instructors to participate in the decision-making process, the level of interactions between instructors, and the pedagogical growth that could have occurred through these conversations. Decision-making around the other two course components, instructional methods and exams, was more likely to be independently determined by the instructors, who valued this autonomy. Participants in the study identified various ways in which collaborative coordination of courses can promote but also inhibit pedagogical growth. Our findings indicate that the benefits of collaborative course coordination can be realized when departments develop coordinated approaches that value each instructor’s autonomy, incorporate shared and ongoing decision-making, and facilitate collaborative interactions and knowledge sharing among instructors

A 96-well DNase I footprinting screen for drug–DNA interactions

The established protocol for DNase I footprinting has been modified to allow multiple parallel reactions to be rapidly performed in 96-well microtitre plates. By scrutinizing every aspect of the traditional method and making appropriate modifications it has been possible to considerably reduce the time, risk of sample loss and complexity of footprinting, whilst dramatically increasing the yield of data (30-fold). A semi-automated analysis system has also been developed to present footprinting data as an estimate of the binding affinity of each tested compound to any base pair in the assessed DNA sequence, giving an intuitive ‘one compound–one line’ scheme. Here, we demonstrate the screening capabilities of the 96-well assay and the subsequent data analysis using a series of six pyrrolobenzodiazepine-polypyrrole compounds and human Topoisomerase II alpha promoter DNA. The dramatic increase in throughput, quantified data and decreased handling time allow, for the first time, DNase I footprinting to be used as a screening tool to assess DNA-binding agents

Speech Communication

Contains reports on two research projects.National Institutes of Health (Grant 2 ROl1 NS04332)National Institutes of Health (Training Grant 5 T32 NS07040)C.J. LeBel FellowshipsNational Science Foundation (Grant BNS77-26871