I spent April 24, 2015, in two half-day presentations led by David R. Brown in the Division of Undergraduate Education at the National Science Foundation. Special thanks to my colleague Stacey Bridges for organizing these events.

The first presentation, Dave outlined how the NSF supports innovation in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, math (STEM) education. It was a blizzard of acronyms which Dave patiently translated for us, always with a smile and a twinkle in his eye. One slide, for example, was about

NSF DUE SBIR/STTR Phase IICC

At that stage, it was all traxoline to me.

To summarize what happened in the presentation: the NSF is a complicated organization that funds billions of dollars of research ($7.2 billion this year) including research in undergraduate STEM education.

If you’re looking for a grant to study undergraduate STEM education, you should find your way to the IUSE grants (the evolution of STEP, TUES, and WIDER grants), deep within the NSF:

Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE)
grant from the
Division for Undergraduate Education (DUE)
in the
Directorate for Education and Human Resources (EHR)
at the
National Science Foundation (NSF)

Writing a Successful DUE Proposal

The afternoon session with Dave was full of advice for writing successful education grant proposals. He had three key messages:

First, the best professional development you can get to help you write successful grants is volunteer to be a grant reviewer.

Second, and I’ll quote Dave:

In order to maximize potential for award, follow the Program Solicitation and Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) with highest fidelity (or face RWR: return without review.)

Third, every grant writer should read and align their proposal with these 11 landmark works.

1. PCAST Report: Engage to Excel

PCAST_Report The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) forecasts “a need for producing, over the next decade, approximately 1 million more college graduates in STEM fields” and makes 5 recommendations for reaching this goal:

catalyze widespread adoption of empirically validated teaching practices;
advocate and provide support for replacing standard laboratory courses with discovery-based research courses;
launch a national experiment in post secondary mathematics education to address the mathematics preparation gap;
encourage partnerships among stakeholders to diversify pathways to STEM careers; and
create a Presidential Council on STEM Education with leadership from the academic and business communities to provide strategic leadership for transformative and sustainable change in STEM undergraduate education.

Source: look for full report plus an executive summary by finding the 2012 “Undergraduate STEM Education Report” at the PCAST Documents and Reports.

2. CoSTEM 5-Year Strategic Plan

CoSTEM_Report In May, 2013, the Committee on STEM Education (CoSTEM) within the National Science and Technology Council released, “Federal Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education 5-Year Strategic Plan.” The report recommends 5 areas for STEM Education investment:

Improve STEM instruction.
Increase and sustain youth and public engagement in STEM.
Enhance the STEM experience of undergraduates.
Better serve groups historically underrepresented in STEM.
Design graduate education for tomorrow’s STEM workforce.

Source: Look for the full Federal STEM Strategic Plan at the Office of Science and Technology Policy.

3. DBER Report

DBER_Report In 2012, the National Research Council published the Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER) Report. It describes how each of the STEM disciplines can address 3 key issues:

Student-centered learning strategies can enhance learning more than traditional lectures.
Students have incorrect understandings about fundamental concepts.
Students are challenged by important aspect of the domain that can seem easy or obvious to experts.

Source: download a copy of the DBER Report or read it online through the National Academies Press.

4. Reaching Students by Nancy Kober (2015)

Dave calls this a “Follow-up to DBER Report for Practitioners” and a “How-to guide for DBER”. At the CIRTL Forum in April 2015, Myles Boylan, Lead Program Director at the NSF DUE, highlighted this report, too.

Source: download a copy of Reaching Students or read it online through the National Academies Press.

5. “The Similarities Between Research in Education and Research in the Hard Sciences” by Carl Wieman

Carl Wieman is a Nobel-prize winning physicist who’s spend the last decade researching how undergraduates learn and how to train instructors to design and teach active classes using evidence-based practices. The Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia is a fantastic resources for teaching and learning in higher education. (Full disclosure – I spent 5 years working at UBC in the CWSEI before going to the University of California, San Diego. That experience continues to be the foundation of my work.) Carl also spent time in the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), the organization responsible for the PCAST Report.

Source: Wieman, C. (2014). The Similarities Between Research in Education and Research in the Hard Sciences. Educational Researcher 43 (1), pp. 12-14. doi: 10.3102/0013189X13520294

6. “Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics” by Freeman et al.

(A) In active classes, students’ grades increased by about 0.5 standard deviations — about half a grade. (B) Far fewer students fail in active classes. (Source: Freeman et al. 2014)

This landmark paper by Freeman et al. describes a meta-analysis of 225 published studies that measured student performance in traditional lecture vs. active learning classrooms. The evidence is overwhelming that active classes are more effective. As the authors put it, if this was a medical study where students in active classrooms were given an experimental treatment with the traditional, lecture-based classrooms as the control, they’d stop the study and give everybody the experimental treatment. Wired blogger Aatish Bhatia wrote a great summary of the paper and Carl Wieman published a short commentary.

Source: Freeman, S., Eddy, S.L., Miles McDonough, M., Smith, M.K., Okoroafor, N., Jordt, H., & Wenderoth, M.P. (2014). Active learning increases student performance in science, engineering, and mathematics. PNAS 2014 111 (23) 8410-8415. doi:10.1073/pnas.1319030111

7. Describing & Measuring Undergraduate STEM Teaching Practices (2013)

The book is the result of a AAAS/NSF meeting that drew participants from nearly 50 institutions to identify tools and techniques that can be used in describing teaching practices. It discusses five techniques that individuals or organizations can use to measure STEM teaching: faculty and student surveys, interviews, classroom observations and teaching portfolios. The best descriptions of STEM teaching typically involve the use of multiple techniques, the book concludes. (source)

Source: You can get a PDF from the meeting website (follow the “Describing and Measuring Teaching Practices” link)

8. Project Evaluation

This “User-Friendly Handbook” covers

Evaluation and Types of Evaluations
Steps in the Evaluation Process
An Overview of Quantitative and Qualitative Data Collection Methods
Strategies That Address Culturally Responsive Evaluation

Source: Section by section PDFs and a PDF of the entire 2002 document are available here. There’s a 2010 edition (PDF), too, but Dave didn’t mention it.

9. Center on Education and the Workforce at Georgetown University

The PCAST report, recall, calls for 1 million more college graduates in STEM fields. Not 1 million more faculty, researchers, graduate students, and postdocs but on undergraduates who will graduate and then do what? Join the workforce. The NSF is interested in funding projects that help these undergraduates prepare for those careers. These 2 reports from the Center for Education of the Workforce are resources for education researchers less familiar with life outside the ivory towers of academia.

Source: Five Ways That Pay Along the Way to the B.A. by A.P. Carnevale, T. Jayasundera, & A.R. Hanson (2012). STEM by Anthony P. Carnevale, Nicole Smith, and Michelle Melton (2011).

10. Community Colleges in the Evolving STEM Landscape

Remember, the PCAST calls for an additional 1 million college graduates, not university graduates. Those of us in R1 institutions can’t forget that the teaching and learning research we carry out (ideally, with NSF support) has to be applicable to teaching and learning in 2- and 4-year colleges, too. What does that mean? How are colleges different than universities? Are there any differences in the students? These questions and more are addressed in this report prepared by Steve Olson and Jay B. Labov.

Source: Like the DBER report, this report is published by the National Academies Press and is available online in HTML and PDF.

11. Common Guidelines for Education Research and Development (2013)

(Not to be confused with NSF Grant Proposal Guide (GPG). These guidelines were developed by the representatives from the Institute of Educational Sciences in the U.S. Department of Education and from the NSF. As Dave puts it, it offers guidance on building the evidence base in STEM learning, including

guidelines intended to improve the quality, coherence, and pace of knowledge development in STEM education
guidance intended for program officers, prospective grantees, and peer reviewers
it is not intended to be prescriptive or exhaustive

For various types of research and development, from those contributing core knowledge to those assessing implementation of interventions, the Common Guidelines describe the

Purpose
Empirical and theoretical justifications (evidence base)
Types of project outcomes (evidence generation)
Quality of evidence

Source: A PDF is available from the NSF. Here’s a FAQ about the Common Guidelines.

Remember, the goal is to align your proposal with these works (or at the very least, don’t contradict them.) Dave recommends putting them all on a USB stick and keeping them handy when writing (or reviewing) NSF DUE proposals. And once more, Dave reminds us, follow the Grant Proposal Guide (GPG) “with highest fidelity.”

Good luck with your grant proposal!

Portraits of #CIRTL15

April 30, 2015

Peter Newbury

I had the pleasure of attending the CIRTL Network‘s conference, “Preparing the Future STEM Faculty for the Rapidly Changing Landscape of Higher Education” at Texas A&M in College Station, TX on April 12 – 14, 2015.

It was a great meeting with a lively Twitter backchannel using hashtag #CIRTL15. My friend, Derek Bruff @derekbruff, archived the Twitter traffic and I’ll update this post when he shares it.

Speaking of Derek, he’s really good at drawing #sketchnotes, that is, recording presentations in pictures and words. Here’s his summary of Anya Kamenetz’ keynote on the future of higher education.

I’m an amateur sketchnoter, too, but I’m not good enough to sketch entire presentations yet. Instead, I try to draw the people giving the presentations. I’m deliberately practicing getting better at remembering people’s names and drawing them seems to help. So, here are many of the people who spoke at #CIRTL15. I know I missed a few. And my apologies if you’re in this collection and you don’t look anything this 😉 Whenever possible, I linked to their presentations, all of which are available on the CIRTL Forum website.

Randy Bass
Associate Provost and Professor of English, Georgetown University
Plenary Address: In the Crystal Ball: What will Higher Education Look Like in 2030?

Derek Bruff’s sketchnote of Randy’s presentation

Benjamin Flores
Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Texas at El Paso
What Do Current Demographic Trends Predict for the Students of 2030?

Jennifer Glass
Professor of Sociology, University of Texas, Austin
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty in the context of changing demographics?
The Future of the STEM Labor Force: Implications for Training and Curriculum

Peggy Shadduck
Director of the Dallas Community College District STEM Institute
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty in the context of changing demographics?
Focus on 2-Year College Students

Olufunmilayo Adebayo
Graduate Student, Biomedical Engineering, Cornell University
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty in the context of changing demographics?
How can we effectively make mentorship and sponsorship training, a part of the graduate student experience?

George Siemens @gsiemens
Executive Director of the LINK Research Lab, University of Texas at Arlington
How Do We Best Utilize the Teaching Technologies Yet to Come?
Derek Bruff’s sketchnotes of George’s presentation

Emilieanne McCranie
Graduate Student, Chemistry, Vanderbilt University
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty in the context of technological changes?
In Search of Experience: One graduate student’s quest for a teaching philosophy

Derek Bruff @derekbruff
Director, Center for Teaching, Vanderbilt University
Panel Moderator and Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty in the context of technological changes?
MOOCs as Networks of Local Learning Communities

Jim Julius @jjulius
Faculty Director of Online Education, Miracosta College
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty in the context of technological changes?
A Community College Perspective

Anya Kamenetz @anya1anya
Author and Education Reporter, NPR
Keynote: The Future of Higher Education: People, Practices, Tools (linked to Derek Bruff’s sketchnotes)

Mary Deane Sorcinelli
Distinguished Scholar in Residence, Mt. Holyoke Wiessman Center for Leadership
The Future of the Professoriate: How Must We Change?

(Derek Bruff’s sketchnotes of Mary Deane’s presentation)

Katie Kearns @kkearns23
Senior Instructional Consultant, Indiana University Bloomington Center for Teaching and Learning
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty for the changing nature of teaching positions in higher education?
Intersections of Identity and Instruction

Alison Rober
Assistant Professor of Biology, Ball State
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty for the changing nature of teaching positions in higher education? University

Myles Boylan @myles_boylan
Program Director, National Science Foundation
Panelist: How do we prepare future faculty for the changing nature of teaching positions in higher education? University
At the NSF, we are interested in changing graduate education for the better

Suzanne Ortega @sortegaCGS
President, Council of Graduate Schools
Closing Reflection

Bob Mathieu
Director, CIRTL
Closing Discussion

Crystal Dozier @ArchaeoCrystal
Graduate Student, Archaeology, Texas A&M University
Patterns of Efficacy of Teaching Concepts of Race in Anthropology

One last sketch. Bob Mathieu reminded us again and again about the CIRTL Mission:

To enhance excellence in undergraduate education through the development of a national faculty committed to implementing and advancing effective teaching practices for diverse learners as part of successful and varied professional careers.

With my life-long interest in astronomy and space exploration, I couldn’t help but draw a CIRTL mission patch.

A mission patch for CIRTL — What’s a mission without a mission patch?

That’s my portrait(s) of #CIRTL15. Again, my apologies if I made anyone look too old, too young, too ogre-like, too anything. And if, by chance, you see yourself here and want to use my sketch, go ahead. I’m sharing them under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) 4.0 International License.

Hello, my name is Prof–, no Doc–, no, ugh.

April 8, 2015

Peter Newbury

teaching 4 Comments

I have the pleasure of teaching a course at UC San Diego called “The College Classroom.” It’s a course for graduate students and postdocs about teaching and learning in higher education. Sometimes it’s theoretical, like when we talk about constructivism or mindset, sometimes it’s practical, like when we talk about various evidence-based instructional strategies, and sometimes it’s extremely practical, like what to do and say on the first day of class of the course you’re teaching.

(Image by Peter Newbury) — (Illustration by Peter Newbury)

On that first day of class, when you’ve finally created sufficient materials, found the classroom, figured out how to connect the &%@# adapter to your laptop to display your slides, and at last, flip on the microphone — yeah, at that moment, you’re not at your best. You’re nervous and exhausted and excited and… And that’s not the moment when you want to be making important decisions that will impact the rest of the course.

So, I prompt my students to think NOW about those decisions, especially:

I prompt students to think NOW about what they want their students to call them.

I use clickers to gather their choices, not because there’s a right answer but because it encourages everyone to think and commit (for now) and click, and the spread in the votes demonstrates there’s no one correct answer. The discussion following the vote is rich.

So many possibilities

Here’s as many of my students rationales as I can remember. I’ll use pretend instructors Michael (Mike) Jones and Elizabeth (Beth) Smith as examples.

My students are graduate students and postdocs, recall. Almost all of them were uncomfortable with Professor. We all know that “professor” is a title you earn at university through tenure-track and tenure positions. “Professor” means a lot and no one wants to misrepresent their status and level of achievement. I totally agree. But students are likely to call you Professor because that’s who teaches at university, right? When a student raises his hand and asks, “Professor Smith, could you explain how you got that again?” he’s not expecting this

Oh, sure. But first, let me say I’m not actually a “professor” because I’m still working on my thesis. Once I defend and find an tenure-track position — fingers crossed, have you seen how competitive the market is — then I’ll use professor. But back to your question…

This is why you should decide now what you want your students to call you, and let them know.
Same goes for “Dr. Jones,” say the graduate students in my class. That’s a title that’s earned through hard work that they have not yet completed. No one wants to falsify their credentials.
Many of female graduate students feel they’re stuck with “Elizabeth” (or “Beth” if only your grandmother calls you “Elizabeth”) because they’re uncomfortable with “Miss Smith.” They often feel they must work extra hard to establish their credentials and gain the respect of their students, and “Miss” seems like it works against that.
I recently heard of 2 situations where the women in my class are okay with “Miss”:
- One woman says she’s been teaching in high school and there, she uses “Miss Beth” with her students.
- Another woman in my class, a person-of-color, says in her community, “Miss Beth” is a sign of respect and an accepted way for a student to address a teacher.
Many deliberate chose to use their casual, first names like Mike or Beth because they want to create a more collegial feel in the classroom, trying to remove the barrier between students and instructor.
When I was teaching, I also told them what I didn’t want to be called because Vancouver already had a Dr. Peter and he deserves every morsel of recognition and respect he earned through his outreach.
I think everyone in my classes saw, like so many other aspects of working in higher eduction, it’s easier for the male instructors to make this decision.

And that’s really the point of this whole exercise in my class – to make a decision. Now. When you’ve got time and you’re thinking straight.

Do you teach? What do your students call you? Why did you pick that name?

Align your NSF DUE grant proposal with these 11 landmark works