yeah
so welcome and welcome to the very first
webinar for the undergraduate field
experiences research network we're
really excited to have you all here and
we're gonna get started right away so we
could have plenty of time to hear from
our speaker today my name is Kari
O'Connell and I'm the principal
investigator of the Undergraduate Field
Experiences Research Network it is an
NSF funded research coordination network
project and we're building an inclusive
and open network that focuses on
improving undergraduate field
experiences and we invited our first
webinar speaker to help us launch this
launch this work well be planning future
webinars
dates to be decided and they'll cover
topics related to our project goals
which are these we will where as I said
we're building an open inclusive network
we would love for all of you to be
involved if you're interested and hear
thoughts and ideas and we'll end our
webinar today with the slide about ways
that everyone can get involved and get
more information so before we get
started I just want to do a little
discussion about some facilitation to
make sure everything goes smoothly so
you should see in your session control
bar a Q&A box so if you have questions
during the webinar you should be able to
type those in at any time what we'll do
is we'll have our speaker finish and
then with some time at the end to do all
the questions questions that people have
another option for a way to communicate
is you also should have a chat button
and you all are welcome as participants
to share ideas and resources on the chat
and I certainly encourage you to do that
and we'll save the chat
and post that along with the webinar on
our website so you can access those
resources again and like I said we'll
record the webinar and put on our
website so now that we have some of that
facilitation over with I'm really really
pleased to introduce and welcome Dr.
Susan Rondell Singer to give our kickoff
webinar and just a little bit about
Susan she's currently the vice president
for academic affairs and provost at
Rollins College and she pursues a career
that integrates science and education
aiming to improve undergraduate
education at scale
her current NSF funded research with Ann
Austin at Michigan State focuses on
networks of organizations working to
improve undergraduate STEM education
before this position at Rollins College
she was division director for
undergraduate education at NSF and
Lawrence McKinley Gould professor in the
biology and cognitive science
departments at Carleton where she served
for 30 years she has been involved in
the absolutely impressive array of
national efforts including chair of the
AAAS education section and a
member of the National Academies board
on science education where she was a
participant in six national academy
studies including chairing two of them
and she will be able to bring this
national perspective to her presentation
today we are very pleased to have her as
our kickoff speaker for the UFERN
webinar series and have her help
launching the network she will talk to us
today about undergraduate field
experiences challenges and opportunities.
Hi everyone I'm so excited to be part of
the launching of a research coordination
network I found them to be incredibly
valuable in terms of my own experience
and look forward to where this network
can go what I'm hoping to do today is to
give you a broad overview of the
national landscape in which we're
trying to improve STEM education with a
focus on where we end up with undergrad
research and field stations, marine
laboratories. So I wanted to start out
with why are we all worried about
improving STEM education and I think you
know at 30,000 feet it's because we face
global grand challenges at an
unprecedented scale and it's gonna take
our collective expertise, wisdom,
compassion, passion to address these
collectively and I was really excited to
see in the National Academies report on
enhancing the value and sustainability
of field stations and marine
laboratories in the 21st century that
one of the key recommendations was that
we really have an opportunity here to
bring together scientists from a whole
range of disciplines including our
social scientists to really begin to
think about how to address these global
challenges and if we want our students
to prepare to do this we need to think
about STEM education quite holistically
right so one of the challenges is to
build these T-shaped individuals where
you have very deep disciplinary
knowledge right I'm trained as a
biologist but I work with folks in all
different kinds of disciplinary domains
and that takes a range of strong intra
and inter-personal skills and
I'll come back to that later but
I just wanted to highlight that there's
another terrific report out of the
National Academies on enhancing the
science of team science and if we're
gonna work across disciplinary
boundaries oops
I'm my mouse got a little ahead of me if
we're gonna work across disciplinary
boundaries we really have some
interesting challenges in developing
individuals that are very good in
working in teams so I'm gonna start not
looking back we'll do that in a few
minutes but I'm going to look ahead
because if we're preparing students we
need to think about who our students are
gonna be in the next decade and make
sure we're ready for those students so
during the recession we had a 13%
reduction in birth rate so ten years
from now there's gonna be a smaller
population of students going to college
and my colleague at Carleton College
Nathan Grodd has done a really
interesting study looking at the demand
for higher education and the salient
point in his analysis is that not all
high school aged students are equally
likely to go to college and they're not
equally likely to go to the same types
of college so if you're in one
demographic with well-educated parents
with very high income level there's a
95% probability that you'll go to a
four-year college and actually a 70%
probability of attending a top 50
college or university for a member of
another underrepresented group with a
single parent and a lower family income
there's less than a 10 percent chance of
going to a four-year college and about a
2 percent probability of going to a top
50 college or university and that really
for me gets me thinking about all this
talent, potential talent in STEM and how
do we become more inclusive and bring
people in because we're going to need
everybody to solve these problems so one
of the interesting things that Nathan
did in his study was he mapped different
regions of the country and said between
2012 and 2029 what's gonna happen
in terms of the size of the population
of students going to college of
different kinds so red is a decrease
that's going to be you know like a 15%
or more decrease in the student
population and on the blue end of the
spectrum greater than a 7.5 percent
increase so red means there just aren't
gonna be students going to college and
you can see the patterns differ in terms
of who's going to a two-year or regional
national or elite four-year school
what's compelling about Nathan's work is
he built a model and said okay what if
we then and this is on the left hand map
here what if he halved the effect that
income was happening on who goes to
college and then over here what if we
halved the effect that race and ethnicity
are having remember blue is terrific in
terms of more people going to college
red not so happy and this is a model
looking at national and elite four year
schools so if we could begin to address
income and race we could greatly
increase access to college and access to
great minds that could help us solve
major challenges. The National Academies
report on barriers and opportunities to
two and four-year degrees unpacks this
challenge and now I'm shifting from a
prospective analysis to how we got to
where we are and why attending to this
broad demographic is  a compelling challenge so I
wanted to start first on the left hand
side here this is the plot that goes
from 1965 up to about 2015 and it's
looking at the percent of individuals
who attained a bachelor's degree by the
time they're 24 as a function of their
family income so there's socioeconomic
status so the top line here in blue this
is for the upper quartile of
socioeconomic status right and we've
pretty much doubled degree earning in a
generation we've gone from 40 percent to
77 percent if we look down here at the
purple line these are students coming
from the lowest quartile of
socioeconomic status and we've seen a
six percent to a nine percent increase
in bachelor's degree attainment
so we functionally double the gap in
college attainment between lower and
higher income earning families in a
single generation and there there are a
lot of reasons for that and their worth
thinking about their worth doing further
research on but we make a lot of
assumptions beyond family income and the
barriers and opportunities study
outlines that right so one is this
pervasive belief that certain people
have natural abilities and that
ethnicity determines success we have
very complex pathways to completing
degrees and STEM degrees can be more
expensive and I think when we think
about field experiences right that costs
a little bit more how do we make sure
everyone has access and we have a hard
time capturing data in this country when
people swirl through community colleges
and that affects specifically these low
income earners
now one of the common responses is well
by the time we get to college it's been
a K-12 challenge depending on where you
live you've had different access
different opportunities and you just
aren't ready to go and I think there are
a lot of reasons to push back on that
argument a little and say we need to
teach the students that come to our
colleges and to do that this the data I
wanted to show you here looks only at
students who scored in the top quartile
on SAT scores or ACT adjusted for an
SAT like score as a function of
socioeconomic status so what we're going
to do here is look in this set of bar
graphs at the students that went on to
college to a four-year college as a
function of family incomes so darkest
bar - highest quartile SES 80% of those
students go to college only 44% of the
lowest quartile go to a four-year school
these are equally academically capable
students based on standardized test
scores the differentiating factors
family income and here who doesn't go to
college only 6% of very talented young
people from economically privileged
families versus 1/3 of the students from
less economically
ables family so you can see again how we
get this gap in college degrees over
time intersection between degree and
gender matters also so income gender and
we'll get to race in a second this is
some data from Tony Carnevale's shop at
Georgetown and you know it's kind of
startling right men with some college
but no degree earn about the same as a
woman with bachelor's degrees and women
have to have a PhD to make
as much as a man with a bachelor's
degree when you begin to unpack it right
it's not that we're just paying women
less for equal work it's that women are
getting degrees in different fields we
continue to have fewer women getting
degrees in engineering and in computer
science which tend to be higher income
generating occupations and the same
place out with race so despite the
increase in college attendance by
African-Americans the income barrier
correlates with fields that people are
choosing and I want to be very careful
right that we should all choose fields
of study and work that align with our
passion but when someone aspires to
something and the doors to that pathway
are closed to them that's a different
case so let me give you a few examples
and remind you that African Americans
compose about 12% of our population only
3% major in agricultural and Natural
Resources fields and I think that's
particularly telling for those of us
that are passionate about field work and
you can see the numbers are also low for
a number of other fields in stem
including only 7% in biology and life
sciences so how did we get to this point
lots and lots of reasons and you can see
so far I've been trying to make a
compelling case for why we want to
improve STEM education but what UFERN
is all about is using evidence to
improve STEM education and we're slowly
getting to the point where we're making
evidence-based improvements but it's
been a long time in coming so I'm going
to give a brief case study with biology
so not that long ago actually 1887 we
biologists were trying to make the case
that biology should be a field of study
in higher education right that it would
be possible to major in biology and
I'm gonna jump forward to 1958 for a
couple of reasons the post Sputnik era
really stimulated a lot of interest in
improving education but not necessarily
in understanding and doing the research on
what is leading to that improvement so
the biological sciences curriculum study
which exists today and literally changed
the way we teach biology as a more
inquiry driven a field of study started
then and we'll come back to it but
that's when NSF first started funding
undergraduate research by the mid 90s a
whole coalition of professional
societies in the life sciences there's
around 147 different life science
societies just in our country came
together to try to press on improving
life science education and you see begin
to see professional societies developing
education committees that become more
active and vibrant where it really scaled
was in the 2000s with the vision and
change effort in undergraduate biology
education funded and supported over time
by the National Science Foundation the
Howard Hughes Medical Institute the
National Institutes of Health this next
figure you know it's not for you to
necessarily spend a lot of time looking
at but I hope it will inspire you as you
start UFERN as a network to think
about over and this is about a 10-year
period when a group of individuals
nationally come together and decide
they're gonna drive change in an area in
this case it's how we teach
undergraduate biology a lot of things
happen and more importantly a lot of
things begin to stick so that's a really
interesting model you might want to come
back and reflect on and think big and be
ambitious for UFERN
so there was a lot of change in
undergraduate biology education and if I
stopped with my last two slides I would
leave you believing perhaps that it was
just the collective will of a group of
passionate people I think that's true
but I think there's more to the story
than that
so there were a lot of other factors
that were driving changed at the time so
biology education was getting pressured
to shift from being a descriptive field
of study to being a data-driven very
analytic field of study so this National
Academies report several years ago now
in a new biology for the 21st century
argues that a typical biologist may
actually not even be a biologist but
could be a physicist or a computer
scientist you saw in the FS ml report
the reference to convergence that's a
another way of thinking about all these
fields working together that came out of
the nano biotech initiative at
NSF Jen Susan Hockfield and Phil Sharp
the MIT pushed this quite hard with the
National Academy study convergence is
now one of the priorities at the
National Academy at the National Academy of Science but also the National Science
Foundation we see a lot of data
intensive work in environmental studies
and genomics it's moving into education
MOOCs and large-scale data generated
from online learning provide us with a
robust source of data I'm certainly not
arguing that we do field experience
online but we have opportunities to
learn about learning from larger scale
data sets and we also saw the emergence
of a field called DBER: Discipline-Based
Education Research this particular
report was released in 2012 and it's
actually the first time there was a
synthesis of what we know based on
evidence about learning and
undergraduate science and engineering
2012 a little surprising right so DBER
looks at learning really deeply embedded
in the priorities of a discipline it's
complimentary to and integrates a lot of
other fields of learning what's
interesting about the DBER work and a
report that came out of the President's
Council of Advisors on science and
technology called Engage to Excel is how
the research has driven policy and
funding and I think created a really
rich opportunity space for the the work
and the research agenda UFERN may
imagine and you can see in my blue box
here on the right that I'm you know
calling out that there was really
terrific pressure to improve laboratory
learning and more discovery based
research that led to a 2013 release of
the first ever federal STEM education
five-year strategic plan at the
undergrad level the push on research was
in there but it's also present in all
the other groups including informal
science education so I think that's a
interesting and important opportunity
space for all of you and UFERN so why
is the research piece so important it's
one of the high-impact practices
associated with student success on the
left side of the screen here I'm sharing
with you a couple reports out of the
American Association of colleges and
universities and some work by George Kuh
showing that these practices like
research are associated with student
success there's a just to be provocative
a paper that I listed down the bottom
that came out last week challenging some
of that research in terms of its impact
on graduation rates and I think that's
worth thinking about my first blush
interpretation
is that it's not enough to just say I
had a research experience it's
understanding what that experience looked
like there's also the Gallup-Purdue
work that came out in 2014 in
experiential learning and support and
the kinds of experiences undergraduates
report that make a difference in their
life long well being so financial or
being health their satisfaction with
their work and if you look through those
I won't read them to you but you'll see
that there are many elements in there
that are really reinforced by a
first-rate research experience so in the
FS ml report there is a call for field
stations to really begin to understand
how to engage students in collaborative
research in active learning because it
will increase interest and persistence
so again this report is very well
aligned with a lot of other national
calls for action that are evidence-based
so what do we know about undergrad
research and you know I as I go through
this I'd like all of you to just pause
and think about your early research
experiences if you had them what impact
did it have on you my whole professional
life has been shaped by research
experiences beginning with a high school
research experience at a medical college
and undergraduate research so I'm asking
you to check in to some of those
memories because we also have tied to
that a lot of assumptions and passion we
actually I think if we have shared
beliefs about this that goes back 200
years to Berlin and to Humboldt's idea of unified
teaching and research first discussed in
1810 I happen to go to Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute the oldest
engineering school in the country
started in 1824 and what's fascinating
about the curriculum that Amos Eaton
started there was it was totally
integrated research and teaching
students did experiments six hours a day
and they lectured rather than being
lectured at about their findings and
were quizzed and as early as 1927 there
was a prize for the best undergraduate
research dissertation established by
graduates of the class of 1902 so very
very long history there in terms of
marine stations field stations right
there's a very long history I believe
one of the oldest experiences is at
Woods Hole Marine Biological lab the
embryology course started in 1893 and
has run every single summer since then a
really deep research immersion and what
I'd like to move into briefly is this is
not just good in terms of education it
also contributes to research so think
about your introductory biology course
or even high school and genetics Calvin
and bridges and Calvin bridges and
Alfred Sturtevant made groundbreaking
genetics discoveries that our students
still learn about they were
undergraduates at Columbia so students
engage in research to learn and to
contribute the National Science
Foundation since 1958 has funded
research experiences originally this was
the undergraduate research participation
program launched in fifty-eight in 1981
which was actually the year I graduated
from college so it's really kind of
playing it for me
was zeroed out in President Reagan's
budget requests to Congress in 1987
it was re-instituted and has
continued since then as the research
experience program for undergraduates I
was at Carleton by that time and managed
to have seven site awards for
undergraduates doing research and I bet
many of you have either benefited from
experiences or learned from them and
when I was at NSF the division I was in
the division of undergraduate education
we coordinated the program across all of
the directorates but each of the
directorates manage their own REU funds
and it's interesting to think about as
you think about integrated approaches to
research within that structure how you
get them more cross-cutting efforts in
place so let's go back to evidence right
so I challenge you to think about what
you believe about research undergrad
research is at the heart of everything
I've done for 32 years right I've had
140 undergraduate research students
I managed REU sites I believe in REU
so I actually started on that jaunt with
a bit of evidence but a very little bit
and I want to challenge all of us that
there's so much more we need to learn I
actually started at Carleton College in
1986 and Bob Edwards was the president
at the time and he had led a study
called the Oberlin study this New York
Times article that I cite describes this
but the top 50 liberal arts colleges in
the country went in and looked at some
interesting data at NSF and found that a
disproportionate number of students
getting their undergraduate degrees at
these small liberal arts colleges went
on and got PhDs and were
disproportionately per-capita
contributing to the professoriate and as
they looked at the data their conclusion
was that it was because so many of these
students have really deep research
experiences as undergraduates and it
turns out that's really important at a
small school because you don't have
graduate students you want to get your
research done so it's easier you know
or there's great necessity for those
undergrad research students to be true
research collaborators this has grown
far far beyond the undergraduate
colleges in the course of my career but
I think it's interesting to see that
study and it's also interesting that
that study and I went back in and looked
at some of the archives actually drove
being the return of the funding for
research experiences at NSF and again to
the point that it's not just valuable
educationally there's this 2017 study
that shows we've really undervalued the
contribution that undergraduate
researchers make to advancing knowledge
so where are we you know they're about
five hundred REU sites running every year
about five thousand undergrads there are
supplements for folks that have
researched grants another about 3,500
students you know varies from budget
year to budget year but about you know
summers around 80 million getting
invested in this and there are lots of
other places that fund undergrad
research to be very clear but they do
really great things right and I'm not
going to go through this whole list but
this is a set of characteristics of high
quality experiences for undergraduate
research students in a traditional
apprentice style model and they
participate in full spectrum of research
the challenge is and we have about 5000
institutions of higher education in this
country and some of them have tens of
thousands of students with the funding
models we have say to just NSF and
acknowledging there are lots of other
sources of funding but you can maybe
reach 10,000 undergraduates each summer
you're not gonna reach all the students
that could benefit so one of the newer
models that's emerging is to integrate
research into the course experience this
National Academies convocation report
gives a broad overview of the work
that's happening in that arena and there
are all kinds of course based research
projects Howard Hughes Medical Institute
has funded the SEA-PHAGES program for
introductory biology for a long time on
the right to papers that have come out
of fly based genetics consortiums some
have over a thousand students authoring
a paper in Nature I mean it's pretty
exciting to see what students are
collectively doing curenet is another
RCN that pulls these experiences
together Erin Dolan has provided
leadership on that and then I included a
collaboration of small colleges that I
participated in where we didn't all work
on the same project but we all figured
out how to help people bring genomics
approaches into the model of a system
they were working on so they brought
their research expertise into the
classroom but there was a common thread
in the sharing opportunity so different
ways consortium can work together and so
that really leads us to a range of
research opportunities these are you
know students in my my former lab at
Carleton but you know there's research
in a course context there's independent
research during the academic year
there's 10-week summer experiences and
they have varying degrees of structure
and scalability that can serve different
functions but it's a way to reach more
students and again you know you can
learn about learning in those situations
right you can do research on learning
you can improve education and you can
contribute to advancing knowledge in
your field so this is just from the
project that I did over time with my
students at Carlton
I also think we need to be really
curious about what other folks are doing
what we can learn from them the science
education Resource Center at Carlton
Cathy Manduca's shop has pulled together a national community of scholars that work
in improving geology education which is
almost entirely field based so I did a
few screen captures from the website but
if you're looking for really high
quality peer-reviewed material on
different approaches to enhancing
learning in the field there's great
resources there and then we're what kind
of pulled things together towards the
end uh some work that my team and I did
while I was at NSF really wanting to
push the research agenda to understand
what we need to know about undergraduate
research we commissioned and funded the
National Academy of Science to do a
study on the multiple dimensions of
undergraduate research experiences for
STEM students and I'd really encourage
your group to take a look at the report
you can see from this list that there's
a whole range of research experience
it's not just the traditional approach
and the beauty of the report is they
identified what key elements go into a
high quality experience again because
you can go back and look at the slides
I'm not gonna work through each of these
I will point out that you know as I
started early on opportunity for
teamwork which again from the SFML
study as you work across disciplines
very important and the last one is the
importance of a mentor and we really
need to learn more about mentoring so we
know that you can increase graduation
and retention rates in STEM
especially for underrepresented groups
data from the University of Michigan
tracked since 1988 things like
increasing sense of belonging and this
is a nod to the Supporting Students
College Success another study at the
academies we commissioned but you can
see there's all
there are a range of intra and
interpersonal skills that can be
enhanced but what's troubling is so much
of what we know about undergraduate
learning has yet to be applied to these
research experiences somehow they've
gone down parallel tracks and I think
again UFERN has an opportunity to
bring those together in terms of
mentoring you might want to follow
there's a newly launched study at the
National Academies on mentoring so it's
it's just getting launched but that may
give us additional guidance on how to
provide professional development for
mentors rather than just say go do it
the College Success report is a really
valuable one looking at assessments and
what we know works in terms of
supporting students college success and
lifelong well-being, sense of belonging,
growth mindset, that if I work hard I can get
better at X versus I'm not good at math
or oh I'm great at math and utility
goals and values that I see this work is
gonna get me to where I want to go with
my life and then there's moderate data
supporting their interventions and
success in some of these other areas as
well but it's wide open
field stations are a great place because
it's such an intense wraparound
experience to explore some of these
areas as well as cognitive games and we
have a lot of research gaps that one
could look at there right so the link
between interpersonal competencies
teamwork and college success or lifelong
success competencies in community
college students we don't know as much
about mostly four year students and very
very little work has been done tied
specifically to STEM it's been much more
generic so are these things particularly
effective in STEM differentially
effective we don't know the answers to
that especially interpersonal
competencies and again
field stations are a great place to
explore those questions and gosh we need
some really innovative assessments so
let me just step back right I started
talking about the national scale and
changes there I'm gonna come back and
challenge us to think about how we might
know long-term beyond the specific work
we're doing because UFERN is a
national network how might we be
collectively improving STEM education so
the third report that my team
commissioned from the National Academies
was to develop a national indicator
system and there were three goals in
that and collectively everything
together is looking at the progress of
our nation not of any one institution
alone but the nation as a whole so
cognitive gains for students equity,
diversity, and inclusion and then
actually having enough STEM
professionals to meet our workforce
needs and those are discipline specific
within STEM fields of course so there's
a whole framework that's kind of
interesting to think about and I offer
the framework because as your network is
moving forward
this isn't your framework but the idea
that a framework in terms of what you're
putting in what the environment that
you're working in what the educational
processes are that are involved and what
the outcomes are is a very helpful way
to frame things and we actually had not
done that for STEM education at a
national level and I think this is a
useful model and again you know a
national level is different than what we
might do in an individual course study
or an institution study right we can't
go assess the learning of every student
in the United States that's just not the
way forward but we can find ways to
measure whether or not we're using
effective teaching practices and so this
slide just gives you again a way of
thinking whatever scale you're trying to
do your assessment on you know how can
you get indicators that are at
surely plausible and possible at that
level so I'm going to leave you with
these thoughts there's lots of
information but I think the opportunity
space right DBER started in looking at
cognitive learning but there's a much
broader set of questions we can ask and
I think you can be part of this DBER
2.0 generation we need to look at a
cross-section of competencies we need to
look at equity and inclusion and that's
why I spent quite a bit of time at the
beginning of this webinar trying to help
you understand from my perspective why I
think that's incredibly important for
all sorts of reasons and then thinking
about how do we really get systems level
change and how do we measure that change so I think we end with the FSML report
and E.O. Wilson's inspiring convergence
type of quote but more importantly field
stations will serve as key centers for
education at all levels I would amend
that field stations will serve as key
centers for education research at all
levels and let me stop there and turn
this back over to Kari should you have
questions some conversation might be in
store also thanks for your time I've got
to stop sharing my screen. Now it's back
to Kari. Susan thank you so much
that was really inspiring and really informative and we clearly have a lot of work to do but
super exciting to think about how we can
all do that together I know you can't
see everyone but I'm sure we're all
clapping for the great presentation you
gave us so i i've been tracking and we
actually don't have any - oh yes, and I
see that people are saying thank you
Sean Anderson yeah
so I encourage everyone to use the Q&A
button to start typing in a few
questions for Susan so we'll do the
virtual parallel of giving everyone a
minute to think and give us some
questions to think about and while we're
giving everyone a few minutes I'm gonna
actually go back to my presentation that
people oh this that people can see ways
to get involved with UFERN while
we're answering some questions so I'm
just gonna read these questions for
Susan and we'll get through as many as
we can before the end of the hour and
then Susan has offered for anything
that's left unanswered that will try to
provide some answers up on our website
so the first question and forgive me if
I mispronounce names um Trina
Kilty asked how do you think field
studies and research experience for
undergraduates might play out at
community colleges where courses
typically don't go beyond introductory
as in no majors yet? Ah so I can steer
you to a really interesting network of
community colleges they call themselves
CCURI the community college
undergraduate research initiative - Finger
Lakes Community College in New York
State is kind of the hub but it's
national and if you look at the website
for the council on undergraduate
research which is mentioned here in the
slide that Kari has up you will see that
they have a publication out on doing
undergraduate research at community
colleges and they have all sorts of
tools for community colleges to assess
readiness to engage in undergrad
research a lot of it starts as course
based research one of the takeaways that
I find really compelling from their work
because they did it as a research study
as well as actually doing and continuing
to do great research with their students
was that you have to have a team right
and I think so often any one of us has a
great idea and we go home and we want to
make that happen I've been guilty of
this too
rather than getting other colleagues
that are also excited and all of you
doing it together
so that the effort is sustained if you
move on or you you know take a leave or
you're doing other things. Thank You
Susan for getting a few more questions
the next one Coomer Doss asked she says
thanks for your presentation Susan I
direct the Office of Undergraduate
Research at Lamar University how do you
encourage faculty to get involved in
mentoring undergraduate students? Ah so
you know what are the things that we
have here at Rollins College Kumar that
might be interesting we have something
called the student faculty collaborative
research initiative and you know
different faculty member cords it
coordinates it for several years we have
endowed funds for it and I've been
working hard since I came to Rollins to
help us increase that endowment but it's
a very prestigious opportunity for
students to apply to work with a faculty
mentor they work with the mentor to
develop the proposal and then there's
funds for the mentor for the student and
for supplies and there's a it's a fairly
large group of people that receive these
each summer there are weekly meetings
the students give presentations to each
other it's not so different than an REU
site award except it's internally funded
and again my prior institution did a
brilliant job of raising endowed funds
and having the cotton
there see so building this culture but
with the supports for the faculty and
the incentive for them to include the
undergraduates has helped a lot Thank
You Susan
we just have a question from Sean
Anderson on chat which I'll read to you
tons of research with inner classes so
often we are out in the wilderness in
terms of funding I'm wondering about
support specifically to document the
efficacy of these modalities? Ah
so Sean when I was at NSF we went
through and sorted all of the funded
work at the time to see if there you
know what was happening in terms of
course face research and you know I
think that you would find that the
division of undergraduate education at
the National Science Foundation
especially the IU's program improving
undergraduate STEM education is a place
where you could come up with an
innovative idea for doing this field
based research with your students and
learning from that right 'cause you want to
build on existing knowledge and you want
to generate new knowledge in these types
of programs but I would take a look at
that program I don't know what field
you're in but I know Dave Moke who was
at Montana and I believe he's recently
retired but I think you know he's
published you can find out about him on
a search site that I mentioned as well
his research over a number of years was
with his students in the field so out
doing you know wonderful geology work in
the Rockies but understanding and doing
research on the students while they were
doing research Thank You Susan so we
have a couple more questions
Graciela
asks are there opportunities for
students in physics or other non-life
sciences majors to participate in field
experiences in biology? I think that you
know anyone who applies and can make a
strong case would be given serious
consideration and what's really
interesting is as we you know shift from
thinking about undergraduate researchers
as being you know almost grad students
that work with us to help generate data
to also think about it being a learning
experience there's a lot of evidence
that engaging students in the first two
years of college and research
experiences especially for traditionally
underrepresented groups is very likely
to enhance their persistence in college
I know often in the first two years you
know you may not have even declared a
major right you're not necessarily
biology or physics
I have loved having physicists, computer
scientists, mathematicians on my research
teams over the years my current research
project I actually have a student who's
working on an MBA and business working
with me and my prediction is as research
becomes increasingly convergent we're
going to need to build those
interdisciplinary teams. Thanks Susan, a couple more - Janet Branchaw asked: The idea that we need to focus
on measuring how we're teaching e.g.
evidence-based instructional practices
rather than student learning assessment
at the national level to measure
systemic change is very interesting can
you comment on how you see assessment of
student learning contributing to the
effort specifically how should we be
supporting those who are teaching to
learn about and use rigorous learning
assessments to guide their teaching? Okay
so yeah thanks, yes if I came across
with that message in any kind of
dichotomy let me put that to rest I
think we need need to look at all
dimensions of learning and actually I
think the the biggest concern I have is
that you know if we just say we're all
doing active learning everything should
be fine it probably won't be fine at all
at the end of the day we want to
understand that whatever we're doing
helps students learn so a lot of the
strategies that have come out of the
DBER work that show increased learning
are actually studies done with a very
limited pool of students and we don't
know how that might work in another
context I think these network
improvement communities like the statway
quantway workout of Carnegie with Tony
break are really brilliant because
you're taking these ideas and you're
looking at them in different settings
and you're constantly assessing is it
working well working means is the
student learning right and so at my
institution we use we actually use the
AC&U value rubrics and we follow
students at different points and for us
the value proposition is the students
can do more as a result of interacting
with you so I don't think it's an
either/or an evidence based practice you
know it's a term that maybe just like
inquiry gets loaded over time right and
I just think we need to be curious about
what we're doing and figure out what is
we want to have us the outcome and we
have to assess whether that outcome is
meaningful or not so it's on faculty
professional development we need to
assess whether the faculty are teaching
more effectively but if we just stopped
there at the local level it's over with
but you may have inferred from my
comment at the end about the indicators
right that were used seeing effective
teaching as a proxy to be
that kind of dichotomy that's
not the case I think we have to be
really careful that we don't end up with
what has happened in some K12 situations
where there's some assessment bar for
student learning and we expect all
students to get to that bar and if
they're not then it's you know the
teachers responsibility different
students start at different points they
have different motivations they have
different goals we have a very diverse
higher education system in the US and I
think it would be disadvantageous steps
some kind of national level learning
test that we used for everyone you know
there's a lot of bias in large-scale
standardized tests. We have one more
question so and this is Chris Lorenz and
he asked or says wonderful presentation
thank you very much
where might you spend more efforts to
increase the number of underrepresented
groups in the STEM majors in college and
it goes on a little bit target the high
school level? Or toward
those college students who have yet to
declare a major or in other majors? Or
lastly is it most efficient to spend
time and resources to increase retention
and graduation rates of current STEM majors?
Yeah so my this is my view with what
I've seen with the data and everything
over the years I think the best bet for
us is to look at our gateway courses
and figure out how not to have them be
gatekeeper courses and we know how to do
that but we're not doing that in many
places right like even take the
scale-up classrooms but beakers work
that was actually Priscilla laws at
Dickinson College and Jack Wilson RPI
and then Bob a nurse research really
spread that you can close the gap
between different groups over a single
course or you can absolutely widen it
and we're losing students from
underrepresented groups at a
disproportionately high level in our
introductory courses I think there's
much to do after that but if I could
pick one thing right now I would get
better across the board at an inclusive
introductory science sites learning
course whether it's physics or chemistry
biology, geology, and geologists are
actually a neat example right because
geology is not typically taught in most
high schools so they're busy recruiting -
biology we're thinking oh my gosh you
know can we find enough seats and lab
spaces for everyone
geology integrates amazing field
experiences they're trying to help those
first year students understand how
amazing geology is they've done a great
job figuring out how to attract students
and now they're working really hard and
there's a joint program at NSF between
the geosciences and the division of
undergrad education how to change the
experience for students so that you get
more underrepresented groups in geology
they're there that's a challenge
so recruiting is different for them
thank you so much I think I will end
here so we'll be on time and to all of
you with us we are gonna put the webinar
up on our website and I have aspirations
to also share a list of some of the many
wonderful resources that Susan mentioned
as far as publications and manuscripts
so I encourage you to sign up on our
listserv and we'll send out a kind of
reminder when all that is up and then
continue to announce future webinars so
thanks so much to all of you for joining
us and again a virtual clap to Susan
and a big thank you for her wonderful
presentation. Thanks everyone
best of luck with this RCN.
