Background: Team-based instructional change is a promising model for improving undergraduate STEM instruction. Teams are more likely to produce sustainable, innovative, and high-quality outcomes than individuals working alone. However, teams also tend to involve higher risks of failure and can result in inefficient allocation of valuable…

Background: Instructional change efforts involving teams of change agents are becoming increasingly prevalent at higher education institutions across the US. Teams may be able to make more lasting and high-quality changes to STEM courses than instructors working alone. But team-based change efforts are also risky. They tend to require more…

Background: The undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education community has developed a large number of innovative teaching strategies and materials, but the majority of these go unused by instructors. To help understand how to improve adoption of evidence-based education innovations, this study focuses on…

Calls for improvement of undergraduate science education have resulted in numerous initiatives that seek to improve student learning outcomes by promoting changes in faculty teaching practices. Although many of these initiatives focus on individual faculty, researchers consider the academic department to be a highly productive focus for creating…

Background: Prior efforts have built a knowledge base of effective undergraduate STEM pedagogies, yet rates of implementation remain low. Theories from higher education, management, communication, and other fields can inform change efforts but remain largely inaccessible to STEM education leaders, who are just beginning to view change as a…

Background: Every year, significant effort and resources are expended around the world to develop innovative instructional strategies and materials to improve undergraduate Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics education. Despite convincing evidence of efficacy with respect to student learning, most will struggle to become successfully…

While many innovative teaching strategies exist, integration into undergraduate science teaching has been frustratingly slow. This study aims to understand the low uptake of research-based instructional innovations by studying 21 successful implementations of the Student Centered Active Learning with Upside-down Pedagogies (SCALE-UP) instructional…

Physics education research (PER) is a relatively new and rapidly growing area of Ph.D. specialization. To sustain the field of PER, a steady pipeline of talented scholars needs to be developed and supported. One aspect of building this pipeline is understanding how students come to graduate and postdoctoral work in PER and what their career goals…

Despite having significant knowledge of effective practices, along with curricular and pedagogical resources, efforts to transform introductory sequences have met with only modest success. While educators may know what to do, they do not know how to enact and sustain these reforms at scale. What they need is a framework for understanding STEM…

This article reviews current scholarship about how to promote change in instructional practices used in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. The review is based on 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles published between 1995 and 2008. Four broad categories of change strategies were developed to…

Within the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education community there are repeated calls for the reform of undergraduate teaching. Resulting change efforts often focus on developing and disseminating specific instructional ideas and practices to individual faculty. However, in this paper, the authors argue that these efforts…