Enhancing Community College STEM Teaching through Faculty Development

This project aims to serve the national interest in high quality undergraduate STEM education by improving a faculty professional development model focused on improving STEM teaching. Specifically, this project will support faculty to create STEM course modules that include issues of civic engagement and equity. Community colleges provide STEM education to an increasingly diverse audience.

This education needs to provide students with STEM knowledge and skills, as well as equip them with both systems thinking and civic engagement tools. To achieve these educational goals, the project will help faculty improve their STEM courses by developing course modules that address the science of environmental change within a socially relevant context.

This approach may provide a scalable model for strengthening STEM teaching and learning, while simultaneously broadening participation in STEM and preparing citizens and scientists for 21st century challenges.

This project builds upon and extends Bellevue College’s and North Seattle College’s successful faculty professional development efforts by incorporating two curriculum design frameworks: Science Education for New Civic Engagement and Responsibility and the Equity Ethic. The project will develop a new professional development curriculum intended to support STEM faculty as they modify environmental lessons to build students' civic engagement, systems thinking, and equity-minded skills.

The project will analyze the effectiveness of this course module approach versus a traditional whole-course approach. The project plans to engage at least 35 STEM faculty and 1,800 STEM students at the two colleges, with the potential to impact many more faculty and students if the model is adopted by other institutions. The design of a transferrable professional development curriculum will benefit from the two-college collaboration, which enables the investigators to pilot, revise, and implement the curriculum in two different community college contexts.

These two contexts will enable large scale implementation and comparative evaluation. The project team will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of the professional development curriculum on STEM teaching, the impact of the modules on student learning outcomes, and how incorporation of the modules affects students’ systems thinking skills as related to civic engagement and equity.

All materials and results from this project will be broadly disseminated at local, regional, and national scales. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. This Level 1 project is situation within the Engaged Student Learning track, through which the program supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.