image: Michelle Withers, Associate Professor of Biological Sciences and a STEM Educator at the Center for Learning & Teaching, recently received an NSF grant to improve STEM education in the SUNY system.
Credit: Photo Credit: Binghamton University. State University of New York at Binghamton.
If you really want students to learn, design your course backward.
Set aside the textbook and ask: What do you want students to know, understand, and be able to accomplish by the end of the course?
“That’s a sea change for a lot of people,” observed Binghamton University Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Michelle Withers.
A neurobiologist by training, Withers has focused her career on investigating how people learn and what that means for effective STEM instruction. She received a nearly $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation to promote the adoption of high-impact educational practices in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) throughout the State University of New York system. Collaborating institutions on the project include Stony Brook University, SUNY Geneseo, Yale University, the University of Connecticut, and the National Center for Science and Civic Engagement.
Traditional STEM lecture courses focus on conveying large amounts of information pertinent to the discipline, but that’s not how most people learn. Rather than passively listening to an instructor, students benefit from active, collaborative, and project-based learning, research shows.
However, attempts to shift STEM education away from the traditional lecture model have met resistance. Withers’ project plans to address this challenge by providing multiple layers of professional development and access to peer networks and resources, enabling educators and institutions alike to improve their pedagogy.
In the traditional model, STEM educators often begin teaching in graduate school, without prior training in pedagogical methods. That was true for Withers herself.
“I was just lecturing at people. You bore yourself, you bore your students, and you don’t know what’s wrong,” she reflected.
After securing a teaching position at Louisiana State University, Withers attended a national pedagogy training workshop for the first time, which transformed her approach.
“It was like someone flipped a switch for me. The lights came on, and I started changing my teaching,” she said. “There are decades and decades of work on how people learn and what that means about how we should be teaching. But in STEM, you get really rigorous training in your discipline, but you don’t necessarily get training in how to teach.”
After completing the training, Withers found a new mission: reshaping STEM instruction through professional development. She developed the Mobile Summer Institute as a cost-effective iteration of the original training workshop she attended, bringing professional development to campuses rather than having educators travel to regional or national events.
In the early 2000s, STEM professional development focused on addressing individual deficits. However, the pedagogical problem is systemic in nature, going beyond the teaching abilities of individual instructors, Withers pointed out.
“This grant is taking a broad systems approach to changing STEM higher ed. What that means, essentially, is that we need rapid dissemination of active, collaborative, project-based learning in STEM,” she said. “We’re trying to hit this problem at multiple levels.”
Beyond the ‘Content Monster’
All too often, STEM instructors feel pressured to feed the “Content Monster”: to cover the entire textbook in class and test students on their memorization of the concepts therein. But the push to present an overwhelming amount of information often backfires; concepts that are memorized rather than understood are quickly forgotten, Withers pointed out. And in a digital world where factual information can be quickly looked up, it’s counterproductive in other ways as well.
“My students don't need to remember everything. They really need to build a conceptual framework within their discipline of the foundational concepts, and how things connect to them,” Withers said. “They need to learn how to learn, how to think and problem-solve.”
Rather than serving the Content Monster, instructors can present students with a problem to solve — engaging their attention while teaching important concepts. That might look like an experiment or a case study, depending on context. Along the way, memorization will come naturally, as students encounter the same material repeatedly.
Why, then, doesn’t STEM education take this approach more often?
The problem is twofold. First, STEM practitioners may not realize that teaching is a skill that can itself be taught, rather than an innate talent. Second, a form of survivorship bias may be at play: today’s professors came up through the traditional system and may view it as a proving ground, holding students solely responsible for failure. The professor’s role is simply to present information; it’s up to the students to learn it.
Institutional expectations also play a role; professors may be incentivized to focus on research rather than classroom teaching and receive little recognition or support for improving their pedagogy. Withers hopes to change that dynamic.
“We’re trying to get a foothold with faculty, with educators who are on the front lines in the classroom, with change agents, and with administrators to change the culture around teaching,” she said.
During the grant, the project will offer five-day summer institutes for faculty, using active learning to teach active learning. In addition to developing new approaches for their classes, participants will test their materials with peers to obtain needed feedback. They’ll also learn how to gather evidence about their teaching as they go along, to see whether the changes are effective.
Fifteen campuses have agreed to host the in-person institutes. Facilitators will also train future trainers, so they can run future workshops on their own campuses. Virtual versions of the training will also be available, along with two virtual workshops in Course-based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE), such as Binghamton’s First-year Research Immersion (FRI) program.
Participating schools are encouraged to communicate with one another to aid in problem-solving and program development. Local trainers and facilitators will work with three outside consultants: an online developer from Stony Brook University who will help participants with AI-assisted adaptive learning; the Delta Project, which offers a systems approach to teaching evaluations; and the National Association of College and University Business Officers, for a look at the financial side of institutional change.
Right now, many people are questioning the value of college, Withers noted. Couple that with a demographic shift leading to fewer enrollments, and higher education is facing challenging times.
“With those big challenges, we need to really look at what we’re doing,” Withers said. “We could emerge from this as a phoenix from the ashes if we take advantage of the opportunity to make change.”
About Binghamton University
Binghamton University is a nationally ranked public research university and one of four university centers in the State University of New York (SUNY) system. Founded in 1946 and located in Vestal, N.Y., Binghamton is an R1 research institution, tackling complex challenges and driving innovation in areas that shape our world – from next-generation energy storage to responsible AI. Binghamton enrolls more than 18,000 students in 130+ majors across six schools, providing clear pathways for undergraduate students to future careers, supporting graduate students as they advance boundaries of innovation and discovery, and building partnerships that serve the public good from Binghamton to the rest of the world.