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1. Look Who's Talking: Teaching and Discourse Practices across Discipline, Position, Experience, and Class Size in STEM College Classrooms

   https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biab077  

   Alkhouri, Jourjina Subih; Donham, Cristine; Pusey, Téa S; Signorini, Adriana; Stivers, Alexander H; Kranzfelder, Petra (August 2021, BioScience)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Students are more likely to learn in college science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classrooms when instructors use teacher discourse moves (TDMs) that encourage student engagement and learning. However, although teaching practices are well studied, TDMs are not well understood in college STEM classrooms. In STEM courses at a minority-serving institution (MSI; n = 74), we used two classroom observation protocols to investigate teaching practices and TDMs across disciplines, instructor types, years of teaching experience, and class size. We found that instructors guide students in active learning activities, but they use authoritative discourse approaches. In addition, chemistry instructors presented more than biology instructors. Also, teaching faculty had relatively high dialogic, interactive discourse, and neither years of faculty teaching experience nor class size had an impact on teaching practices or TDMs. Our results have implications for targeted teaching professional development efforts across instructor and course characteristics to improve STEM education at MSIs. 

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2. Thinking With Algebra, Two Professors Perspective

   McGathey, N. (January 2023, Proceedings of the seventh annual Indiana STEM Conference. West Lafayette, IN)

   s research brief will share insights from using the curriculum, Thinking With Algebra (TWA), a National Science Foundation Project (DUE 2021414). The focus will be on the value of using this curriculum when working specifically with students who have taken Algebra I and Algebra II in high school, but were not prepared for college algebra or precalculus. This curriculum is specifically designed for STEM-track students who place below the level of college algebra when they enter college. The authors have found that TWA helps instructors honor the mathematical knowledge and ideas that students bring into the classroom. The curriculum units give instructors the freedom to choose the topics that suit their objectives. TWA also offers a variety of approaches to help students connect with mathematics in a new way. This brief will expand on these them students that the authors observed when teaching with this curriculum. 

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3. Computer Science through Concurrent Enrollment: Reflections and Lessons Learned Offering Mobile CSP as a Concurrent Enrollment Course

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3408877.3432545  

   Freeman, Seth; Kaiser, Dan; Lindsay, Ryan; Veseskis, James (March 2021, SIGCSE '21: Proceedings of the 52nd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Concurrent enrollment enables high school teachers approved by a partnering college or university to teach college-level coursework to their students. The collaborative research-practice partnership project CS-through-CE examines if and how concurrent enrollment (CE) programs can effectively broaden participation in computing for secondary students. In the CS-through-CE project two participating higher education institutions - Capital Community College (CCC) in Hartford, CT, and Southwest Minnesota State University (SMSU) in Marshall, MN - collaborated with the Mobile Computer Science Principles (CSP) team to train secondary teachers to teach the Mobile CSP course, and then offer the Mobile CSP course as a CE course. In this experience paper, faculty from CCC and SMSU detail their experiences recruiting secondary partners to teach Mobile CSP as a CE course, including the barriers and challenges encountered and the strategies identified for overcoming them. Additionally, participating secondary instructors from Hartford Trinity Magnet College Academy in Hartford, CT and Northeast Range School in Babbit, MN detail their experiences teaching Mobile CSP as a CE course in their high schools. They share their experiences teaching Mobile CSP as a CE course, contrast this experience to teaching the course in an Advanced Placement (AP) format, and detail the benefits they see in each modality. The experiences of the college faculty and secondary instructors in this paper are informative for any secondary or post-secondary educator interested in cultivating or expanding pathways in CS through concurrent enrollment. 

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4. Beliefs versus resources: a tale of two models of epistemology

   https://doi.org/10.1039/D2RP00290F  

   DeGlopper, Kimberly S.; Russ, Rosemary S.; Sutar, Prayas K.; Stowe, Ryan L. (April 2023, Chemistry Education Research and Practice)

   Compelling evidence, from multiple levels of schooling, suggests that teachers’ knowledge and beliefs about knowledge, knowing, and learning ( i.e. , epistemologies) play a strong role in shaping their approaches to teaching and learning. Given the importance of epistemologies in science teaching, we as researchers must pay careful attention to how we model them in our work. That is, we must work to explicitly and cogently develop theoretical models of epistemology that account for the learning phenomena we observe in classrooms and other settings. Here, we use interpretation of instructor interview data to explore the constraints and affordances of two models of epistemology common in chemistry and science education scholarship: epistemological beliefs and epistemological resources. Epistemological beliefs are typically assumed to be stable across time and place and to lie somewhere on a continuum from “instructor-centered” (worse) to “student-centered” (better). By contrast, a resources model of epistemology contends that one's view on knowledge and knowing is compiled in-the-moment from small-grain units of cognition called resources . Thus, one's epistemology may change one moment to the next. Further, the resources model explicitly rejects the notion that there is one “best” epistemology, instead positing that different epistemologies are useful in different contexts. Using both epistemological models to infer instructors’ epistemologies from dialogue about their approaches to teaching and learning, we demonstrate that how one models epistemology impacts the kind of analyses possible as well as reasonable implications for supporting instructor learning. Adoption of a beliefs model enables claims about which instructors have “better” or “worse” beliefs and suggests the value of interventions aimed at shifting toward “better” beliefs. By contrast, modeling epistemology as in situ activation of resources enables us to explain observed instability in instructors’ views on knowing and learning, surface and describe potentially productive epistemological resources, and consider instructor learning as refining valuable intuition rather than “fixing” “wrong beliefs”. 

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5. Characterizing College Instructors’ Attention During Peer Observations

   Jones, E.; Lee, S.; Gehrtz, J.; Prasad, P.V. (January 2023, Proceedings of the Annual Conference on Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education)

   Research has highlighted that actively involving students during instruction can lead to positive outcomes for students. However, college mathematics instructors may need support to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to effectively implement this type of instruction. This study looks at how college algebra instructors in a grant-supported professional learning community (PLC) focus on different aspects of their own and others’ teaching. We leverage the instructional triangle as an analytical framework to characterize the foci of participants’ observations. We analyzed PLC meetings where participants reported on specific aspects of each other’s observed classes. Our analysis revealed that instructors each had a primary focus that drove their observations. We anticipate these different foci will inform future PLC meetings and lead to new questions about instructor thinking, and to continued development of the instructional triangle. 

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