Effective Practices in Undergraduate STEM Education Part 1: Examining the Evidence

              Feature
From the National Academies
Effective Practices in Undergraduate STEM Education
Part 1: Examining the Evidence
Jay B. Labov,* Susan R. Singer,† Melvin D. George,‡ Heidi A. Schweingruber,*
and Margaret L. Hilton*
*Center for Education, National Research Council, Washington, DC 20001; †Department of Biology, Carleton
College, Northfield, MN 55057; and ‡President’s Office, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211
INTRODUCTION
Since the publication of reports in the late 1990s by the
National Science Foundation (NSF; 1996), the National Re-search
Council (NRC; 1996, 1999), and the Boyer Commis-sion
on Educating Undergraduates in the Research Univer-sity
(1998) on the importance of improving undergraduate
education in science, technology, engineering, and mathe-matics
(STEM), at least 13 other federal civilian departments
and agencies have spent billions of dollars on more than 200
programs to realize this goal. Most of that spending has
come from the NSF and the National Institutes of Health
(Government Accounting Office, 2005). Many private foun-dations
also have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in
efforts to improve undergraduate STEM education. For ex-ample,
since 1988 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute has
awarded more than $1.5 billion in grants to improve science
education at the precollege and college levels.1
As a result of this financial support and commitment from
the public and private sectors, research into and implemen-tation
of numerous and varied promising practices for teach-ing,
learning, assessment, and institutional organization of
undergraduate STEM education have been developed in
recent years. These promising practices range from improve-ments
in teaching in individual classrooms to changes in
departments.2 They include increased prominence of cam-pus
and national centers for teaching excellence, profes-sional
development for faculty members (e.g., National
Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education
in Biology,3 On the Cutting Edge: Professional Develop-ment
for Geoscience Faculty4, First II5), and large outreach
and dissemination efforts (e.g., Project Kaleidoscope,6
SENCER7). Virtually all of the new promising practices have
focused on student-centered, inquiry-based approaches to
teaching (summarized in Handelsman et al., 2007) or alter-native
assessments of student learning (e.g., see references in
Deeds and Callen, 2006), compared with more traditional
approaches to teaching that emphasize lecturing and multi-ple-
choice or short-answer examinations. Some of these new
approaches, such as Peer-Led Team Learning8 and Just in
Time Teaching,9 have gained national recognition and
prominence.
Over the past decade, new practices have been imple-mented
in vastly different grain sizes. Some have been tar-geted
at specific classrooms, whereas others have focused on
restructuring entire curricula. Still others have emphasized
the role of assessment and evaluation of learning to improve
teaching effectiveness (e.g., NRC, 2003a,b). Moreover, virtu-ally
all of these practices were developed independently
from one another and have emphasized somewhat different
goals. In addition, communications across the STEM disci-plines
and within their subdisciplines is often lacking.
Thus, despite many years of effort and significant finan-cial
expenditure, surprisingly little is known about the col-lective
impact of these approaches on the academic success
of individuals and of different populations of students. For
example, do more students who experience these new ap-proaches
to learning become sufficiently interested in these
subject areas to want to take additional STEM courses com-
DOI: 10.1187/cbe.09–06–0038
Address correspondence to: Jay B. Labov (jlabov@nas.edu).
1 For additional information, see www.hhmi.org/about/sci_ed/
index.html.
2 For additional information, see http://nsf.gov/div/index.jsp?div 
DUE; U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of
Postsecondary Education/Comprehensive Program. For additional in-formation,
see www.ed.gov/programs/fipsecomp/index.html.
3 For additional information, see www.academiessummerinstitute.org.
Also see Pfund et al. (2009).
4 For additional information, see http://serc.carleton.edu/
NAGTWorkshops/index.html.
5 Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching Project. For
additional information, see http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/ first/
goalsof.htm.
6 For additional information, see http://pkal.org.
7 Science Education for New Civic Engagements and Responsibili-ties.
For additional information, see http://sencer.net.
8 For additional information, see www.pltl.org.
9 For additional information, see http://jittdl.physics.iupui.edu/
jitt.
CBE—Life Sciences Education
Vol. 8, 157–161, Fall 2009
© 2009 by The American Society for Cell Biology 157