Conference: Bringing new perspectives to the Transforming Institutions Conference 2025

This project aims to serves the national interest by supporting a conference to share knowledge and strategies for improving undergraduate STEM education. Given the changing nature of higher education (e.g., new enrollment patterns, an increased focus on students' mental health and wellbeing, greater financial and economic challenges, broader opportunities for increasing economic mobility), it is imperative that those working to create and sustain positive change consider how these broader shifts will impact undergraduate STEM education.

Achieving transformative change in higher education requires understanding multiple perspectives and ensuring that change agents are all pushing in the same direction. The current STEM education reform movement has successfully engaged a large community of faculty and academic administrators but has not yet meaningfully incorporated those who work in student services at universities or those who work in university business and planning offices.

To be effective, greater communication and collaboration is needed within and across organizations focused on improving undergraduate STEM education. The conference aims to bring new and different perspectives into the conversation about how to accelerate systemic change in STEM in order to inspire and support change agents and researchers to engage in this work.

The conference seeks to integrate perspectives from three core functional areas within institutions of higher education: financial management, student affairs, and academic affairs. The theme for the conference will be Taking a Multi-Perspective Approach to Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Education. The goal is to bring together different groups of people who seek to create positive and sustained change in undergraduate STEM education.

Communities represented in the conference will include STEM education transformation researchers and change agents, higher education student services professionals, and higher education business and planning professionals. A particular focus will be on how these different communities can work together to accelerate systemic change in STEM. The conference format is to be designed to purposefully foster participant interaction across the different areas and perspectives represented.

A website will host conference presentations and other conference materials. The website will remain accessible to the public to support continued connections and collaborations. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students.

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.