Large-scale analysis of teaching practices and education communities in the geosciences and beyond

This special issue consists of large-scale analyses of teaching practices and communities in the geosciences and across Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). Research on large portions of STEM education communities illuminates trends in course content, teaching methods, and other professional activities (e.g., workshop participation, research output). En masse, these trends characterize the current state of STEM education. This current state can be used as a call to action for researchers and funding agencies, as a context in which to situate geoscience education research, and as evidence of cross-disciplinary efficacy of education innovations.

Empirical evidence of the current state of STEM education also allows for future measurement of large-scale improvement. Many funding agencies have supported STEM education improvement efforts in recent years, yet it is difficult to determine if these efforts have led to measurable change across the nation. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2018) has called for STEM education to identify and measure indicators of national improvement in STEM education in the United States. Only through this type of large-scale evaluation can STEM researchers track progress toward national goals and provide data to inform future funding directions of national agencies. For example, in this issue, Benabentos and colleagues (Benabentos, Hazari, Stanford, Potvin, Marsteller, Thompson, Cassone, Murasko, and Kramer) analyzed the alignment of teaching strategies across lower and upper division STEM courses. In their discussion, the authors call for education researchers to increase their efforts to promote the adoption of evidence-based practices in upper division STEM courses. As future efforts are undertaken to increase adoption, the results of this study will provide context from which to interpret their impact.

When large-scale analysis includes a variety of disciplines, it creates opportunities to synergize improvement of STEM education to serve all aspects of a student’s career. This special issue specifically targeted article submissions that included large-scale analysis across traditional boundaries in STEM, including disciplinary and institutional boundaries (e.g., geoscience, mathematics, K12, two-year colleges, four-year colleges). Although our traditional organization of communities separate STEM into disciplines and the academic experiences into institutions, in reality, students and scientists regularly cross these boundaries in preparation for and performance of their profession. Just as STEM disciplines have boundaries between them, so also does Discipline-Based Education Research (DBER). DBER has been situated within specific STEM disciplines to learn from and have impact on STEM communities. Recently, groups such as the STEM DBER Alliance (DBER-A: Henderson et al., 2017) and conferences like X-DBER (launched by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2021¹) have realized the need to connect across STEM DBER to maximize impact of each discipline’s work. This means building on each other’s findings and using various contexts to provide insight into what strategies will have the greatest impact on STEM education. For example, in a well-cited large-scale meta analysis, active learning was shown on average to improve student outcomes in STEM (Freeman et al., 2014). This study provided the critical evidence that supported the broad implementation of active learning in geoscience and across STEM. This special issue serves as a bridge between geoscience and other STEM disciplines to build this type of evidence and potential for future cross-boundary collaboration. For example, in this issue, O’Connell and colleagues (O’Connell, Hoke, Berkowitz, Branchaw, and Storksdieck) identify field experiences as an important characteristic that many STEM disciplines have in common. They argue field experiences should be improved across STEM through intentional course design, including student-centered teaching practices.

While large-scale analysis plays an important role in describing the state of STEM education, it is strongest when considered as a complement to localized studies and not as a replacement. As a complex system, localized trends in STEM education may result in unintended large-scale patterns. For example, local decisions on entry into graduate school can impact the large-scale diversity of the discipline (Posselt, 2014). Studies are needed to both understand the local reasons for these decisions as well as large-scale studies that identify the trend and changes in trends due to improvement efforts. In this issue, Ndembera and colleagues (Ndembera, Hao, Fallin, Ray, Shah, and Rushton) investigate demographic factors that influence performance on a K12 teaching certification exam. For example, one of their findings indicates that a large proportion of Earth science teachers are teaching “out of their field” and argue that this may have implications for the quality of Earth science education in K12. Localized studies can identify why so many Earth science teachers are not from the field and lead to the development of interventions to increase the number of in-field teachers.

Each article in this issue serves several purposes in advancing STEM education from synthesizing knowledge across STEM disciplines to identifying future research agendas. Therefore, instead of using the purpose of large-scale analysis to organize this issue, we have identified three themes related to the topics of the research studies. The themes are: (1) faculty practices across STEM education community boundaries, (2) relationships between geoscience and other STEM disciplines, and (3) teacher demographics in primary and secondary Earth science education. In addition to these three themes, we describe a fourth theme based on three previously published articles in the Journal of Geoscience Education that fit the issue’s focus on large-scale analysis. These studies explore the theme of teaching practices across the geosciences.

The first three articles of this issue are investigations of faculty practices across STEM education community boundaries. Gamage and colleagues (Gamage, McFadden, and Macdonald) use faculty self-reports from a national survey of geoscience faculty to explore how geoscience student experiences in introductory courses differ at 2-year colleges versus 4-year colleges. This article is followed by Benabentos and colleagues (Benabentos, Hazari, Stanford, Potvin, Marsteller, Thompson, Cassone, Murasko, and Kramer) who investigate upper division versus lower division faculty practices in several STEM disciplines and Indorf and colleagues (Indorf, Benabentos, Daubenmire, Murasko, Hazari, Potvin, Kramer, Marsteller, Thompson, Cassone and Stanford) who identify factors that predict teaching practices based upon tenure status. These articles highlight the variations in faculty practices based on institution type, course type, and faculty status. Their results have implications for enhancing the experience of students across these boundaries and for promoting evidence-based practices across all faculty.

The next theme explores relationships between geoscience and other STEM disciplines. McFadden and colleagues (McFAdden, Viskupic, and Egger) investigated faculty’s use of the discipline of mathematics (through quantitative and data analysis skills) in geoscience coursework.The paper by O’Connell and colleagues (O’Connell, Hoke, Berkowitz, Branchaw, and Storksdieck) presents and analyzes faculty practices in field experiences across STEM. This theme highlights the interrelatedness of STEM fields and opportunities for the DBER community to collaborate to improve student experiences.

The third theme expands the previous two by considering teacher demographics in primary and secondary Earth science education. Ndembera and colleagues (Ndembera, Hao, Fallin, Ray, Shah, and Rushton) explore the influence of teacher demographics on scores on a widely-used teacher certification test. This article brings important attention to the preparation of primary and secondary teachers and their roles in the geoscience-based experience of students.

In addition to the three themes included in this special issue, we include a fourth theme based upon three articles that previously had been intended to be part of this special issue but were published in earlier issues of the Journal of Geoscience Education. These studies examine faculty teaching practices within geoscience undergraduate education. Beane et al. (2020) investigate the impact of an early-career workshop on faculty, particularly highlighting the positive impacts of the workshop on the attendees’ teaching practices and feelings of community within geoscience education. Riihimaki and Viskupic (2020) identify motivators and inhibitors to faculty teaching practice change. These authors note the relationship between changing teaching practice and course content as well as between changing teaching practice and conversations with colleagues. Viskupic et al. (2021) consider the distribution of faculty practices in undergraduate curriculum and the likelihood of students’ exposure to workforce skills during their undergraduate career. While this theme is similar to the articles in theme one, these studies do not highlight boundaries that exist within STEM education but focus upon characterizing the geoscience education community.

Large-scale analyses of STEM communities articulate the characteristics of the community, the practices of faculty, and the experiences of students. These large-scale studies complement localized studies to build knowledge across all facets of STEM education. Large-scale analyses provide opportunities to measure community improvement, to identify future research directions, and to synergize STEM-wide results to realize comprehensive improvement to student experiences.

Notes

1 https://scimath.unl.edu/x-dber/2021/.