Mee Joo Kim

Awareness of and receptiveness to active learning strategies among STEM faculty

Despite strong evidence of the positive impact of active learning strategies, STEM faculty demonstrate a spectrum of receptiveness to incorporating active learning into their classrooms, and for a variety of reasons, engineering classes continue to be dominated by a passive lecture style. This paper draws on data from a four-year study that investigated the use of five social instruction strategies, including active learning. Twenty-four STEM faculty at 4 institutions were interviewed regarding their understanding of and attitudes toward these strategies. This paper focuses on the results of the active learning component of these interviews. Faculty most often interpreted active learning as what students do and viewed self-motivation as a key component of what students think while active learning. These results, while drawn from a small sample population, can nevertheless make an important contribution to understanding why passive learning remains predominant in the STEM classroom. This paper examines how the findings from this study can inform efforts to promote changes in STEM education that would bring more active learning to the classroom.

Mapping beliefs about teaching to patterns of instruction within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics

In this paper, we identify beliefs about teaching and patterns of instruction valued and emphasized by science, technology, engineering, and mathematics faculty in higher education in the USA. Drawing on the notion that effective teaching is student-centered rather than teacher-centered and must include a balance of knowledge-, learner-, community-, and assessment-centered learning environments; we use qualitative interview data to explore how facultys reported beliefs about teaching are associated with their consideration of these four types of environments. Findings indicated that although a range of beliefs about teaching emerged, most were firmly located in knowledge-centered learning environments, with little or no focus on the remaining three learning environments. Furthermore, even patterns of instruction that were heavily student-centered were situated within a knowledge-centered learning framework. We argue that for student-centered instruction to be truly successful, faculty must consider all four learning environments in crafting and facilitating the classroom environment.