NSF Awards: 1725520
This project is intended to catalyze the transformation of gateway courses in biology, chemistry and physics because of their pivotal role in retention and success of students in STEM. We use the vision of three-dimensional learning (3DL) originally laid out by the Framework for K-12 Science Education, as a common framework around which transformation is focused. The project involves efforts both to 1) support and inform faculty about how 3DL operates and can transform their teaching and learning and 2) develop approaches to assess the extent of the transformation.
Faculty support takes the form of discussions within disciplines to identify a set of core ideas, workshops to support 3DL, and the development of a STEM Gateway Fellows program for faculty who teach in gateway STEM courses. Assessment of the extent of transformation involves several on-going threads including 1) An evaluation of course course assessment items to identify the extent to which 3DL items are used. 2) An evaluation of how 3DL has been integrated into teaching activities and 3) Analysis of interviews with participating faculty.
In this video we will discuss the rationale and theoretical basis for the transformation, provide examples of transformed materials and learning activities, and show the results of four years of transformation across three disciplines.
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
Hello, I’m Melanie Cooper, PI for the Three-Dimensional Learning for Undergraduate STEM Education (3DL4US) project.
Thank you for your interest in “Creating a Coherent Gateway to STEM Teaching and Learning”. Our video invites STEM instructors in higher education to envision a framework that prioritizes students using core science ideas in the context of scientific practices and crosscutting concepts- otherwise known as 3-dimensional learning (3DL). Our project has focussed on supporting faculty to develop 3D assessment tasks and associated classroom instruction activities. In this way our STEM fellows can achieve an interactive classroom that is focused on students using their knowledge to develop deep understanding. Our video features a testimonial from one of our fellows, Dr. Kirstin Parkin a professor of Microbiology at Michigan State University, describing the changes she has seen in her classroom as a result of adopting three-dimensional assessments and instruction.
We are excited about this project because it allows faculty to go beyond “active learning” to support the use of knowledge. We are able to assess the impact of the project by the use of the 3D-LAP, an assessment protocol that characterizes course assessments (Characterizing College Science Assessments: The Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol), and have reported on the initial findings of the project and the factors that appeared to impact its success (Evaluating the extent of a large-scale transformation in gateway science courses)
Some areas we are looking for feedback are:
How does the idea of “going beyond active learning” resonate with you?
What are challenges you see with encouraging faculty to implement 3D instruction and assessment?
What information could we provide that would help in convincing faculty to implement 3D instructions and assessment?
Paul Bergeron
Kristin Flaming
Becky Matz
Elizabeth Day
Nancy Ruzycki
Hi Melanie, This is a very nice project connecting three dimensional learning to Higher Education. The idea of faculty embracing core concept models and then ensuring lesson activities help them build that model are important to "going beyond active learning".
The challenges in encouraging faculty to implement 3D learning is that not all disciplines agree on what their core shared ideas are for content.
We have a sort of similar k9 project posted to the STEMforALL if you want to see our video. It is called EQuIPD: A Model Love Story..
Elizabeth Day
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
Hi Nancy, thanks for your comments - I really enjoyed your video and seeing the connections we are making all the way through the education system!
I agree that (particularly in higher education) there is more disciplinary divergence about what constitutes a core idea. In our project we convened groups of disciplinary faculty (from biology, chemistry and physics), and had them discuss what core ideas were central to their discipline. In this way we did get buy-in from faculty. In this project we used these discipline specific core ideas, and the scientific practices and crosscutting concepts developed in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education.
Elizabeth Day
Scott Balicki
Hi Melanie, thanks for sharing an inspirational video. The idea of "going beyond active learning" is an idea that resonates with me as a high school and middle school teacher. I often find in my context that students initially like the idea of "learning by doing", but then yearn for a more traditional "chalk talk" class structure as soon as it gets challenging. Have you encountered this sort of challenge at the university level?
Christine Lotter
Elizabeth Day
Paul Nelson
Research Associate
Hi Scott,
I don’t think what you’re describing is unique to K12 (or K16); I think it’s human nature! Personally, even as a former K12 teacher, my instinct is the same as that of your students: I’m happy to play with stuff or maybe even talk to other people, but in a classroom setting, I would prefer to let someone else do the intellectual heavy lifting. In a large lecture hall with 300 students, it becomes even easier to melt into the anonymous oblivion of the back row. So resistance to more student-centered, active engagement is probably inevitable, but it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing anything wrong. At the same time, it is a big part of our job to help students avoid that path of least resistance; from my perspective, that’s where 3DL can enter the picture.
One of the outcomes of this project is that as people incorporate 3D learning into their classes, their conception of what productive active learning looks like can change quite dramatically. For me, the Scientific Practices lay out a clear set of diverse but concrete ways to help a novice start thinking like a scientist might when approaching a problem or concept. By providing students with intentional, scaffolded opportunities to engage with the 3DL framework, you are giving them the tools they need to overcome that initial resistance that you describe as a yearning for the chalk talk. I hope some of this was helpful - thanks for contributing to the discussion!
Paul Bergeron
Elizabeth Day
Sara Yeo
Assistant Professor
I enjoyed the video and this idea of 3D learning is new to me (thank you!). I'm wondering how we might adapt 3DL for social sciences. As faculty in Communication teaching about the process of communication research, how might I adapt this for my own courses? Is there a template? How scalable is this method?
Paul Bergeron
Paul Bergeron
Research Associate
Hi Sara! If you want to adapt this for your own classroom and disciplinary context, I would recommend starting with engaging your students in a practice, as that appears to be the easiest way to get into 3D framework. When engaging in a practice, students will explore some idea and it's easier to make it a core idea when you have that practice. At the same time, the Crosscutting concepts inform how we utilize a practice (we like to think of these as lenses).
As Melanie mentioned in a comment above, a starting place for us was to negotiate what we mean by the Core Ideas for each of our disciplines. We've also been working with some mathematicians and a statistician who are all interested in utilizing this framework. Since math and science are two very different fields, we've started from the Common Core Math Standards as a guide to determine what the Math Practices are and how to operationalize them. Trying to do this for your entire field will certainly be a large effort, so I'd recommend trying to identify one or two Communication Practices and Core Ideas to get this process started.
As for scalability, we've let our fellows decide how much they want to transform their courses. One thing that's nice about this framework is that it's about how to approach your teaching, rather than transforming your entire classroom environment. How our fellows do this is to start by expressing their learning goals, then identify what students can do to demonstrate meeting those goals, and finally what assessment items can elicit those responses. They do this for some 'unit' within their class; the unit can be a set of clicker questions, an entire class during the semester, a particular group activity, etc. but we leave it up to them. So, it's not so much how many students can be in a 3D learning environment, but how much of your class you'd like to make 3D.
We can certainly talk more about this process if you're interested!
Sara Yeo
Elizabeth Day
Sara Yeo
Assistant Professor
Thanks, Paul! I would love to talk more about how to adapt 3DL for social science. I think it would be hugely beneficial for students.
Paul Bergeron
Paul Bergeron
Research Associate
Feel free to contact me at berger82@msu.edu (or any of my colleagues on the project), and we can hopefully figure out something 3D that you can take back to your classroom that you find worthwhile.
I also just noticed that you're at the University of Utah – I finished my doctorate there last year.
Hiller Spires
Hi Melanie, this is a very interesting project and ideology for teaching science.
I think that it is so important to have that buy-in from faculty, and workshopping to generate a consensus on those core ideas is a great way to do so. This is similar to the cooperative planning I have done with teachers in working collaboratively across disciplines and schools in my project with PBI Global. Even though it takes time and effort, getting everyone together to brainstorm allows the generation of a plan that everyone can support and feel comfortable implementing. Demonstrating that this model can be adapted across the science disciplines and generate increases in achievement is very convincing that it is effective and worthwhile.
If you're interested in how we integrate science content with other disciplines through project-based learning, our video is called Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global 2020.
Nancy Shapiro
Associate Vice Chancellor
Great project! I think it must have taken some courage (?) to bring this to the higher ed community? It has become a cliche that most faculty are not taught how to teach--so investing in a thoughtful, deliberate, intellectually grounded, evidence-based program of professional development that you have built here for the fellows seems like a very important step forward. The development of the NGSS was an all-hands-on deck approach to rethinking teaching STEM disciplines--it makes a great deal of sense to use what we learned in developing those standards (practice, disciplinary core ideas, cross cutting concepts) and carry that into post-secondary science teaching. Bravo!
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
Thanks Nancy - yes this project is different to many professional development programs for faculty in that we are focussing on what students should know and be able to do with that knowledge, and from that, driving student engagement (rather than focussing on engagement without considering content). In fact, because we began by convening faculty to consider what the core ideas of the disciplines might be, we may have been able to achieve more buy-in than if we had begun with professional development on "how to teach." Additionally, several of our initial project leaders were involved with the development of the NGSS, and moving that work into the higher education space made a lot of sense to us.
Elizabeth Day
Paul Bergeron
Nancy Shapiro
Associate Vice Chancellor
Thanks--I think faculty discussing "core ideas" is foundational to P-16 or P-20 alignment. And if you have any $$ left (hah!) it would be great to include the HS teachers and teacher educators in on the discussions, also. (I'm a big P-20 advocate. I believe we owe it to the kids/students to build coherence into curricula.)
thanks again!
Deborah Herrington
Nancy, I totally agree. In fact, for the past three years I have been working on a project with Dr. Ryan Stowe (now at University of Wisconsin Madison) that involved HS chemistry teachers on developing a HS chemistry curriculum and materials around the 3DL framework. He just recently received a DRK-12 NSF grant to continue funding this work!
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
I was just coming here to say the same thing! Here is the website for the HS-CLUE project (https://stowe.chem.wisc.edu/hs-clue/) (DR-K12 2003680). This is an outgrowth of another NSF supported project, Chemistry, Life, the Universe and Everything (CLUE) (DUE 1359818) (https://clue.chemistry.msu.edu/)
Paul Bergeron
Emily Borda
Thank you for the inspiring video! I especially like how you differentiated active learning from meaningful learning - i.e. just "doing things" is not enough. I am curious about how you put the three pieces of core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts together to implement 3DL in higher ed? You focus on incorporating science practices, but how do you integrate those with the core and crosscutting concepts? Thank you for your leadership in bringing 3DL to higher ed!
Renee Cole
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
Hi Emily. Thanks for your question. We have certainly tried to emphasize how all three dimensions should be blended together in our work with faculty. So even though we began with introducing core ideas we have emphasized and worked with the idea that the practices are the ways we put knowledge to use. We also have a number of other projects focussed particularly on the crosscutting concept of cause and effect (mechanism and explanation), both within a discipline and also across disciplines (in our case biology and chemistry) (see NSF DUE 1725521).
Additionally, one of the ways we have been evaluating the impact of the project is the characterize the nature of the summative assessments and how (whether!) they have changed over time.
Ryan Stowe
Hi Nancy. As Debbie and Melanie said, we are actively exploring how we might support high school students in making sense of phenomena in terms of atomic/molecular behavior. Our team includes both veteran high school chemistry teachers and ChemEd researchers. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to send me an email and/or check out our project website here: https://stowe.chem.wisc.edu/hs-clue/
Nancy Ruzycki
Hi Ryan - I will get in touch with you. We are supporting teachers as early as elementary with particle models for phenomena.
Parvaneh Mohammadian
Thank you for sharing your video and project with us!
I was wondering if you would be available for a zoom presentation to talk about this project to our STEM faculty.
Thanks,
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
Hi Parvaneh
Yes i am sure we could arrange a presentation! Thanks for asking.
Parvaneh Mohammadian
That's wonderful. This is my email address: mohammp@lamission.edu
Would you mind sharing your email with me?
Thanks!
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
of course - mmc@msu.edu
look forward to hearing from you!
Ivory Toldson
President
Thank you for sharing. Teaching science as scientists think is of critical importance it is shows from your video that it has resulted in improvement in understanding more complex concepts. Regarding your question about encouraging faculty to implement 3D instruction and assessment, how have you successfully convinced professors to do this who are potentially "stuck in their ways"? Specifically, what have you found that works or has not?
Paul Bergeron
Paul Bergeron
Research Associate
Hi Ivory! Great question; I think those who are "stuck in their ways" is a challenge all transformation efforts struggle with, our included. We've found that working with professors where they are helps a lot. For instance, while there were discipline-level discussions for the Core Ideas in biology, those discussions haven't happened in physics, so a first step that helped create buy in was to locally negotiate what the physics Core Ideas are.
We also work with our fellows not to change everything about their classrooms, but how they are framing their teaching, which also helps. Having them choose a place where they'd like to see improvement in their teaching or an area of their class that they feel comfortable with experimenting, certainly makes it less daunting and personal of a change. Plus, the instructors we work with, regardless of how their degree of buying in, do like the idea of teaching science as they think, since... it's how they already think!
We can't reach everyone, unfortunately, but reaching some who then have positive and successful experiences with this framework, also helps convince their colleagues. This is a bit before when I arrived, and the full transition is about to happen, but that's essentially the story behind the physics department at Michigan State's transition from traditional lectures to studio environments grounded in a 3D Learning perspective: A few switched over, some with skepticism in a co-teaching format, and were pleasantly shocked by the improvement. Now, the entire department has been more or less convinced this is the direction for their intro classes!
Kristin Flaming
This "learning by doing" approach is how we should be teaching all courses at any age level to engage the learning in real world experiences. Great work!
Michael I. Swart
Great work. And thank you for making your theoretical framework and research objectives clear and sharing with us. What outcomes are you tracking specifically for teachers? For learners?
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
HI Michael. Thanks for your questions. We have been tracking a number of different outcomes. For example we have developed a protocol (the 3D-LAP) that allows us to characterize summative (and formative) assessments as 3D (or not). We have collected course assessments and monitored their percentage of "3D" points. (see .Evaluating the extent of a large-scale transformation in gateway science courses).
We have also been looking at student learning outcomes for specific courses (see for example Reasoning about Reactions in Organic Chemistry) and studies on mechanistic reasoning across disciplines are underway . Studies are also underway how students perceive of the kinds of thinking they are doing in transformed courses.
Faculty and STEM Fellows who have participated in this project have been surveyed and interviewed about the factors that affect their adoption of the transformation, and the results of this work will be published in the near future.
Paul Bergeron
Robert Huie
Hello! Nice job on a great topic! As a high school Chemistry teacher, how would you recommend starting this 3D instruction and assessment before college. I loved the data about student performance vs years teaching using this method. How was the data obtained?
Paul Bergeron
Melanie Cooper
Lappan-Phillips Professor
Hi Robert
thanks for your questions. First we have a HS version of the chemistry course that was part of this project. The website for the HS-CLUE project is here (https://stowe.chem.wisc.edu/hs-clue/) (DR-K12 2003680).Our team includes both veteran high school chemistry teachers and ChemEd researchers. The PI on this project is Ryan Stowe at the University of Wisconsin and i know he would be happy to provide you with more details (or I can!).
The data we collected on student performance were obtained from the Registrar's office as aggregated student data (so there are no worries with identification). We also administered a range of different assessments to students and collected those data as well.
Paul Bergeron
William Zahner
Thanks for sharing this video and for your great questions! I am interested in your second question about assessments. In my experience from my math department, assessment, especially in gateway math courses (pre-calc, calc 1, calc 2), is one of the ever-present challenges we face.
-What criteria do you use to know whether your assessment items are 3D? (I see you have a linked article but I've not read it yet :). Have you considered if the criteria would look different in mathematics classes?)
-How do your instructors handle the logistics of consistently grading 3D assessment items? (thinking here of both the time to grade, as well as the issue of maintaining inter-rater reliability)
-What opportunities do you see in the current moment (of remote learning and disruptions to business as usual) to engage in discussions of how to transform assessments?
Paul Bergeron
Paul Bergeron
Research Associate
Hi William! Thanks for your interest in the project! Certainly, any change always has some difficulty in achieving, but a lot of faculty, we've found, do find the effort worthwhile. The full criteria we use is linked to in our write up as part of the supplemental material; you can download that file via this link.
We do actually have a few mathematicians who are a part of our fellows program, and have been discussing with them how a 3DL framework would look in their classroom contexts. One thing we try to do, is give all of our fellows the latitude to negotiate how they transform their classes and what aspects to focus on. They've all come up with their own sets of Core Ideas to ground their individual classrooms. More recently, we've opened up discussions about the practices as doing math isn't the same as doing science. They're certainly not against engaging their students in the Scientific Practices, but their usage of them was much narrower and infrequent (if we ignore the Mathematical and Computational Thinking, which they can always meet), so it left them wanting. We've begun working with them on the Common Core Math Practices so that they have an operationalized set of criteria similar to the Scientific Practices. Our first steps towards this were quite fruitful, but shortly afterwards we had to self isolate and that's been put on hold; I hope that we can return to that at some point, we just need to find time in our now hectic and burdened schedules.
As for grading, I think it's helpful to think about how we encourage transformation. The starting point is the learning outcomes they want to see, then what evidence they'd accept from students to show that they've met those criteria, which then informs how the assessment should be written/transformed. So how it's going to be graded is a part of the framing when engaging in course transformation, and certainly no one wants to create an assessment they don't want to grade. We have plenty of faculty that are still giving some form of selected response items, and that's perfectly ok! The important part is making sure we're asking students to engage in thinking in a certain way, and not making them do something completely foreign. And while a multiple choice problem might not achieve a practice, a series of them can, just in the same way we might have a multipart free response question (this can also help in keep track of the individual criteria for a dimension when we're writing the assessment item(s)).
Finally, about the current situation and its effects on teaching. We're not completely sure. This is such a stressful time that's required so many instructors to invest substantial amounts of time to reinvent their courses on the fly. So far, we've tried to be hands off but open to helping our fellows if and when they need it. That said, what this period means for 3D Learning, how it's impacting transforming a courses, and what we can do to better support these efforts is something we're interested in. Towards that end, we are planning to engage our fellows to see what their experience amidst this crisis is, so that we can better aide them in creating 3DL environments.
Christine Lotter
As a science teacher educator--I often have to work with science students to understand the importance of active inquiry (3D Learning) for their future high school students when they do not learn science this way at the college level. Transformation at the university level will hopefully lead to greater science literacy as well as more interest in science careers. Great project!