AAU's Rawlings on What It'll Take to Improve Undergrad STEM Education

Q: How will AAU presidents be involved?

H.R.: One thing we'd like to happen is for several of them to volunteer to have their campuses become pilots for these new practices. We're hoping for four to six AAU institutions to be part of an effort—and we hope to write a grant proposal to fund it—to put these best practices consistently into the classroom.

Q: Some universities are already doing much more than that. Why do you need to run pilots?

H.R.: Some places have been very active. But I think we need more examples from big public and private universities, from smaller public universities, and so on. We'd like to be able to offer scientists a body of evidence showing them that, in a situation similar to their own, here are the results.

Q: Your former institution, Cornell, has also been very active. What have they learned?

H.R.: It's important that a university implements these changes as widely as possible. Peter Lepage, who is dean of arts and sciences and is also co-chair of the PCAST [President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology] task force on STEM higher education, is about to introduce some stuff along these lines. It needs to be broad coverage, in math, in engineering, in chemistry, and not just in one course. To be successful, this can't be just individual courses ... because if you change the introductory course but not the follow-up courses, you won't make a lot of progress.

In order for universities to do this, to revise a sequence of courses over several disciplines, we're going to need some real incentives. A grant would provide faculty some time to really work on this.

Q: NSF already has programs to reward teaching in various ways. How would this initiative enhance those efforts?

H.R.: Linda Slakey [a senior administrator within the education directorate at the National Science Foundation], has agreed to be a liaison to our advisory committee. She's a real expert and someone who is passionate about this. I think that she would say we need a much more concerted effort across STEM fields to get a larger body of evidence that X, Y, and Z work and that A, B, and C don't work so well. She's one of the best informed people I know on this.

Q: Your supplementary materials cite a study showing cognitive dissonance among faculty members, with a majority agreeing that teaching is important, but they favor hiring someone with a strong research record over someone with excellent teaching skills. How will that attitude ever change?

H.R.: I think it will change when faculty members become convinced that teaching a great intro calculus course is one of the most important things they could possibly do. It will take that kind of passionate commitment.

Q: What would convince them?

H.R.: One thing would be for them to see success at another university. … Scientists are competitive. And they won't feel good if they hear about another institution that is doing better.

We'll also need to find a better way of incenting serious work on undergraduate education. That could come through teaching awards. But it could also comes through making it clear that serious work on improving undergraduate education will be rewarded come salary time. I think that's essential. I don't think we should beat around the bush.

Q: What will it take for AAU universities to make that commitment?

H.R.: Some of them already have. But we need more. We're not inventing something new here. AAU hasn't done some great new research study that demonstrates something new. Instead, we're trying to get greater adoption of best practices. It's not rocket science. But it is a matter of overcoming barriers that we all know are there, by changing the way you teach your course, or developing a new sequence of chemistry courses. That stuff is hard. Most of us teach the way we've learned. And once we have a syllabus in place, we don't want to spend a lot of time altering it.

Q: You don't talk about broadening participation. Why is that?

H.R.: We don't have it in a goal, partly because we don't know what the goal should be. The numbers show that there are different achievement levels among different ethnic groups, and that these new approaches can narrow that gap by offering more active learning, in smaller groups. So I think that will be helpful. But we don't know the details.

Q: What's your timetable?

H.R.: It's a 5-year project, because this is a deep-seated, long-term problem. We want to spend 5 solid years developing pilots, getting a grant, and pushing our members to adopt these best practices. ... We will look to see if these new methods are producing better results, wider adoption, and new behaviors in terms of rewarding faculty members for pedagogical invention. We want to create a framework to assess and monitor the results.

And it's not just student performance. It's also student retention. One of the big issues is the 40% of students who declare a STEM major and then drop out. Can we affect that number? It's a tall order, but that's what we want to do.