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Projects to improve teaching as a means to improve learning need good tools to measure shifts in the use of effective research-based instructional strategies. We describe a survey tool to assess active and collaborative learning practices in college STEM by asking students to report what practices are used commonly in their course. Student reports correlate with their experience of the learning environment, and with their self-reported learning outcomes. Student means by section are corroborated by instructor-reported use of these practices and external observations. 

Teaching observations can be used in multiple ways to describe and assess instruction. We addressed the challenge of measuring instructional change with observational protocols, data that often do not lend themselves easily to statistical comparisons. We first grouped 790 mathematics classes using Latent Profile Analysis and found four reliable categories of classes. Based on the grouping we proposed a proportional measure called Proportion Non-Didactic Lecture (PND). The measure is the proportion of interactive to lecture classes for each instructor. The PND worked in simple hypothesis tests but lacked some statistical power due to possible scaler ceiling effects. The measure correlated highly with a dependent measure derived from the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP), a holistic observational measure. The PND also provided effective descriptions and visualizations of instructional approaches and how these changed from pre to post.