How does leadership emerge and develop among university STEM faculty working to adopt evidence-based teaching practices? This qualitative case study examines academic departments as sites for instructional change, viewing leadership as an emergent property of the relationships within a social system. The researcher adopted a dual lens of McElroy…

There is a pressing need to improve the sustainability of educational improvement efforts, but sustainability remains undertheorized in science education. In this article, we draw upon frameworks from organizational culture and sustainability to characterize change within a single undergraduate science department. This in-depth longitudinal case…

The University of Delaware Department of Biological Sciences is in a period of change. Pressures, both internally and externally, are driving towards a greater teaching demand. The University of Delaware itself is under a leadership directive that has all departments focusing on performance goals along the lines of peer institutions from the…

Background: The continuation of teacher preparation activities after a 3-year Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) grant is used as a case study to examine multi-faceted aspects of sustainable change in higher education. Since teacher preparation is outside typical physics departmental activities, success is highly dependent on finding a…

This report provides data on the size of degree-granting physics and astronomy departments by examining the number of bachelor's degrees awarded and the number of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty members employed. The benchmarking data in this report is intended to allow physics and astronomy departments to see how they fit in the national…

While there is a wealth of research evidencing the benefits of active-learning approaches, the extent to which these teaching practices are adopted in the sciences is not well known. The aim of this study is to establish an evidential baseline of teaching practices across a bachelor of science degree program at a large research-intensive…

Relationships with colleagues have the potential to be a source of support for faculty to make meaningful change in how they teach, but the impact of these relationships is poorly understood. We used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the characteristics of faculty who provide colleagues with teaching resources and facilitate change in…

Some soil and crop science university programs undergo curricula revision to maintain relevancy with their profession and/or to attract the best students to such programs. The Department of Soil and Crop Sciences at Texas A&M University completed a thorough data gathering process as part of its revision of the undergraduate curriculum and…

The American Physiological Society (APS) and APS Council encourage the teaching of physiology at the undergraduate, graduate, and medical school levels to support the continued prominence of this area of science. One area identified by the APS Council that is of particular importance for the development of future physiologists (the…