BETTER in STEM

Transparency, Accessibility, and Engagement

1) Students engage with transparent, high, and achievable curricular and classroom expectations. 

2) Students have time to think and reflect individually and discuss with peers to develop their ideas.

3) Students co-construct, discuss, adopt, and regularly revisit community norms for productive interactions, discussions, and classroom and lab routines.

4) Students work together to create a classroom environment that promotes connection, relationships, and collaboration. 

5) Students reflect on evidence of their current learning to identify next steps to support and/or adjust their learning strategies.

Power and Cultural Competence

6) Students develop a critical lens toward race, culture, and language to disrupt assumptions and structures that harm learning and belongingness within the classroom learning community. 

7) Students identify and disrupt forms of bias and behaviors that negatively impact the learning community. 

8) Students gain knowledge and skills to participate in a multicultural society and workplace. 

Foundational Structure and Transparency

1) Students’ prior academic knowledge, cultural knowledge, and experiences are elicited and embedded in learning activities. 

2) Students anchor their learning to foundational STEM disciplinary ideas. 

3) Students recognize how the purposes of assignments/activities align to the course's foundational STEM disciplinary ideas. 

4) Students make connections between content in previous, current, and next lessons. 

Equity Ethic: Community Responsibility

5) Students learn how STEM disciplinary knowledge, systems, and structures can be used to benefit or harm specific communities and ecosystems. 

6) Students have opportunities to discuss and critique privileged knowledge systems and learn STEM disciplinary history from multiple cultural perspectives. 

7) Students make connections between the STEM content they are learning and societal issues that impact local and global communities and ecosystems. 

8) Students learn about the contributions of scholars with a variety of identities.

9) Students engage in learning experiences that draw on and value diverse cultures, ways of knowing, and/or frames of reference. 

10) Students reflect on how their professional aspirations and STEM knowledge and skills could address community, local, and global issues.

Structured Group Discussions

1) Students co-construct, discuss, adopt, and regularly revisit norms and roles for productive interactions during group discussions.  

2) Students and instructors engage as co-inquirers during class discussions and activities.

3) Students engage in dialogue that invites multiple forms of communication to elevate all voices.

Disciplinary Genres

4) Students learn and communicate disciplinary ideas through multiple styles, genres, mediums, and modalities, for a variety of purposes. 

Linguistic Diversity

5) Students’ languages and ways of communicating are drawn upon as resources to learn the content and prepare to communicate ideas within the discipline. 

6) Students interact with and use diverse academic discourse, welcoming all forms of language and communication within the class discussions and materials. 

Transparency and Alignment

1) Students explore how the learning objectives for course activities/assignments align with classroom assessments. 

2) Students have opportunities to examine, challenge, and/or contribute to the assessment criteria.

3) Students have a variety of ways to show that they have developed the targeted knowledge, skills, dispositions, etc. 

Feedback and Reflection

4) Students receive frequent, descriptive, and actionable peer and instructor feedback aligned with the assessment criteria. 

5) Students use assessment criteria and peer/instructor feedback to evaluate their own learning and determine how they will improve the quality of their work.

6) Student feedback is used by instructors and classmates to improve the course structure, content, pedagogies, pacing, etc. 

Equitable Grading

7) Student assessment and grading practices reflect a culture of practice through iteration, feedback, and revision that allows students to learn without negative consequences. 

8) Students' lives outside of the classroom are taken into consideration for assignments and assessments, and instructors' exhibit flexibility and empathy.