Toward Joy in Higher Education

Teaching excellence in university science courses

To remain leaders in addressing some of the world's most pressing scientific issues, there is urgent need to redress the rapid attrition of STEM-interested students from STEM majors. One promising solution to this problem, is teaching excellence.

Research in my lab on this topic focuses on: 1) quantitatively describing learning in and attrition from STEM degrees in higher education, with the express intent of 2) understanding what instructors can do to move toward teaching excellence in their classes. 

A current project expands on our recent meta-analysis to explore the course features and instructor behaviors that promote learning and persistence in STEM classes. While we know that active learning can promote learning and retention, active learning alone is not enough - some instructors who use active learning achieve teaching excellence and some instructors do not. An active project in my group is identifying course features and instructor behaviors that promote learning and retention. Additionally, we are creating user-friendly data processing and interpretation tools so that instructors can implement meaningful change in their class - now.

Tools for reflective teaching

A critical approach to achieving teaching excellence is continually reflecting on one's teaching practice and student outcomes. Data-informed reflection is one mechanism to facilitate this goal. However, data on student outcomes and affect can be hard to access, process, and visualize in ways that make patterns clear. To address this need, we work to develop tools that allow users to visualize student outcomes in their class. 

You can access one such tool here. 

Also see publications and inquire about ongoing projects in this area.

Critical elements in Active Learning classrooms

I am interested in the best way(s) to teach biology to undergraduate students. Problems such as how to  teaching science in an engaging way, how to teach about pressing issues, or the intersection of quantitative reasoning in biology classrooms, remain broad interests of mine.

Check out our systematic review of introductory biology textbooks, showing that the social context of biology is largely lacking from common instructional materials. Ack!

In a different project, we asked if students learn more from working through local or global examples of biological phenomena. You can read the results in the paper. (Spoiler: women learn more if they study local examples!)

Another project investigated group dynamics and how a dominator in small groups hinders student performance. That paper was featured in the media!
- In the Chronicle of Higher Education
- On the STEM prof listserve (parent website here)
- In the University of Washington news 

Competition in STEM

Competition can be motivating for some students and menacing for others. But what is competition exactly? How does competition motivate some and menace others? How does competition play out in different STEM disciplines? This is an important line of inquiry that we are pursuing actively.