Education Commons^™

Ours Lived Lived: Faculty Responses To Stem Students' Lived Experiences, Stan Nguyen

University Honors Theses

Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields have historically had low undergraduate retention rates. To aid in counteracting this, classroom exercises, or 'belonging interventions' can play a vital role in keeping new STEM students motivated through the "cultural shock" period of the college transition. However, much is still unknown about STEM instructors' perceptions on belonging interventions in STEM classrooms. Would understanding students' lives and experiences in the past and present help them make better informed decisions in their teaching practices?

To answer this question, we drew upon results from a belonging intervention conducted by the Biology Education Research (BER) group …

Experiences Of Undergraduates And Graduate Teaching Assistants In Biology Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences, Emma Crystal Goodwin

Dissertations and Theses

Evidence of positive student outcomes from course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) has sparked implementation of CUREs in introductory biology laboratory courses, as one approach to boosting student engagement in research. In a CURE, students collaborate with other students and instructors on a research project, where they conduct novel scientific research that has relevance to a local or scientific community. However, previous research rarely considers that graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) often teach introductory labs. The classroom role of GTAs expands in a CURE--they no longer need to simply teach a lab class, but also to serve as research mentors. GTAs, who …

Short- And Long-Term Impacts Of A Deliberative Pedagogy In Introductory Biology And Chemistry Courses, Liz Rain-Griffith

Dissertations and Theses

There have been multiple national calls for curricular reform in college-level science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), including a need to instill democratic skills in students. Democratic skill building can be embedded in STEM classrooms through intentional "deliberative pedagogies" which include skills in: communication, collaboration, and application. We developed and implemented a deliberative pedagogy, Deliberative Democracy (DD), across introductory majors and non-majors biology courses and a majors chemistry course. In two separate studies, I took a longitudinal, qualitative research approach to understand introductory biology and chemistry students' experiences and perceptions of DD. For the first study, I tracked a cohort …