A Course-Based Teaching Experience for STEM Undergraduates Improves Student Perceptions of Teaching Self-Efficacy and Attitudes Toward Teaching Careers

In the Learn By Doing Lab, STEM majors teach hands-on science to third- through eighth-grade students visiting the campus. Participants develop confidence in their ability to teach science and a more positive view of the teaching profession. Participants recognize that the experience builds 21st-century competencies.

Promising or problematic? Perceptions of active learning from STEM students with ADHD and specific learning disabilities

STEM instructors are encouraged to adopt active learning in their courses, yet our understanding of how active learning affects different groups of students is still developing. One group often overlooked in higher education research is students with disabilities. Two of the most commonly occurring disabilities on college campuses are attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and specific learning disorders (SLD). We investigated how the incorporation of active-learning practices influences the learning and self-advocacy experiences of students with ADHD and/or SLD (ADHD/SLD) in undergraduate STEM courses. Semi-structured interviews with 25 STEM majors with ADHD/SLD were conducted and data were analyzed using qualitative methods. Most participants perceived themselves to learn best in a STEM course with at least some elements of active learning. Participants described how they perceived active learning to support or hinder their learning and how active learning affected their self-advocacy. Active-learning barriers could be attributed to a combination of instructional factors. These factors included how a particular active-learning practice was implemented within a STEM course and limited awareness of universal design for learning. Defining the supports and barriers perceived by students with ADHD/SLD is a crucial first step in developing more inclusive active-learning STEM courses. Suggestions for research and teaching are provided.

Remodeling the STEM Curriculum for Future Engineers

Higher education is facing low enrollment, and fewer students are motivated to select STEM majors. This paper reports the results from one university that recently experimentally reformed its undergraduate curriculum to a “theme-based curricula”, the New Engineering Curriculum Program (NECP). The subjects in this study were 127 engineering students who applied for the NECP at a university in northern Taiwan. An experimental design using the pre- and post-test measurements of the experimental and control groups was applied in this study. The results revealed a significant effect among those who participated as second- and third-year undergraduates in terms of their subject-specific performances and attitudes of learning in various courses. Furthermore, the results showed that students in the NECP showed better learning performance and higher learning motivation than students in the traditional course module. The outcomes and analyses are discussed.

FEASIBILITY OF TECHNOLOGY ENTREPRENEURSHIP AMONG BULGARIAN STEM STUDENTS: THE ROLE OF UNIVERSITY

Technology entrepreneurship involves the creation of a new business whose products and services are based on the application of scientific or technological knowledge. Technology entrepreneurship may play an important role for economic development in the context of increasing globalization. Little research attention has been devoted to the antecedents of the feasibility of technology entrepreneurship. The objective of this study is to identify university determinants of the feasibility of technology entrepreneurship among students enrolled in majors in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in Bulgarian universities. The study uses a sample of 879 university students in STEM majors and applies a binary logistic regression to identify university factors related to the high feasibility of technology entrepreneurship. The results of the present study indicate that university support for entrepreneurship, industry ties and research excellence are related to the feasibility of technology entrepreneurship among Bulgarian STEM students. The empirical findings can help to devise policies and measures for enhancing the feasibility of technology entrepreneurship among STEM students.

Developing a Validity Argument for an Inference-Making and Reasoning Measure for Use in Higher Education

The Inference-Making and Reasoning in Biology (IMRB) measure is an assessment tool intended to 1) aid university personnel in advising students on course enrollment, 2) identify students in need of interventions to increase their reasoning skills and likelihood of completing STEM majors, 3) support instructors in determining growth in students’ reasoning skills, and 4) provide a measuring tool to gauge success of higher-education interventions intended to increase reasoning skills. Validity arguments for these four uses of the IMRB are provided by implementing a validity argument approach. This work exemplifies the advantages of framing validation studies within a validity argument framework.

Sustaining Solutions in Undergraduate STEM Education

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) programs that attract and sustain student interest feature learning that is experiential, investigative, hands-on, personally significant to both students and faculty, connected to other inquiries, and suggestive of practical application to students’ lives. Such learning flourishes in a community in which faculty are committed equally to teaching, to maintaining their own intellectual vitality, and to partnering with students in learning, and in which institutional support for such a community exists. The Creative Scientific Inquiry Experience (CSIE) Program at Eastern Michigan University (EMU) is involved in retaining and increasing the number of STEM graduates by including faculty professional development, student connectedness to the sciences and mathematics through academic service-learning, and curricular reform. In this conference paper we report on the success of the CSIE program, including course development, student engagement, student success, especially among underserved students, and sustainability. This work is important because it offers insight into the development, sustainability, and scalability into faculty-driven STEM education reform spanning 15 years. Keywords: STEM education, retention strategies, undergraduate STEM, majors/non-majors