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Wedeveloped an instructional development workshop for science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) instructors in higher education to promote their adoption of active learning. Our workshop design was based on a proposed framework for motivating adult learners consisting of five elements: (1) expertise of presenters, (2) relevance of content, (3) choice in application, (4) praxis, and (5) group work. We assessed the participating instructors’ attitudes (i.e., motivation to use active learning and intentions and motivation to use strategies to reduce student resistance to active learning) immediately before and after the workshop and again five to six months later. We also assessed participants’ satisfaction with the workshop. Analyses of our data provided evidence of a change in participants’ motivation to use active learning and both their intentions and motivation to use strategies to reduce student resistance to active learning following the workshop. Our quantitative findings and thematic analysis of survey results support the use of the proposed framework for designing instructional development workshops for STEM faculty. The results also show short-term instructional development workshops can be effective and suggest caution in extrapolating immediate post-workshop assessment to the longer-term. 

Students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) represent a growing fraction of the college population. We plan to study the experiences of college students with ADHD majoring in science, engineering, and mathematics (SEM) and explore how those experiences relate to academic success (i.e., academic achievement, persistence, and creativity). For this work-in-progress paper, we present our project’s conceptual framework and share how specific aspects of it may relate to the academic success of students with ADHD. Our framework is based on Terenzini and Reason’s college impact model, which includes precollege characteristics and experiences, the organizational context, the college experience, and students’ educational outcomes (i.e., academic success). We also describe the quantitative portion of our two-part research study that will analyze longitudinal data from three nationally-administered, multi-institutional surveys. That analysis will guide further qualitative research focused on the college experience and academic success of college students with ADHD.