Advancing Culturally Responsive Team Learning for Underserved Students in the STEM Classroom: Motivation and Engagement Across Different Class Modalities

Highline Community College, Des Moines WA

Investigators

Abstract

This project aims to serve the national interest by contributing to the need for a multiculturally competent and diverse STEM workforce by advancing the understanding of team learning and its role in student engagement, persistence, and success. The use of team learning is widely acknowledged as important in STEM learning, retention, and career preparation, with a disproportionately positive impact on students from groups that have been historically underrepresented in STEM. Still, there is a knowledge gap as to how to implement this strategy effectively in a two-year college context with diverse student populations. The primary question this project will address is how to make team learning effective in two-year college STEM learning environments, particularly those serving large numbers of students from underrepresented groups and non-traditional students. The results will inform ways to create an inclusive classroom climate as a strategy to retain more students in STEM and ultimately broaden participation in the STEM workforce. Project results should also inform mechanisms that are aimed at creating successful transfer pathways from two-year institutions to four-year colleges and universities. Additionally, this project plans to study the effectiveness of team learning in the new educational landscape brought about by the pandemic, where online and hybrid class modalities are now the norm in two-year colleges. This project has the potential to be transformative by informing how to adapt team learning practices for student success in non-face-to-face class modalities, an immediate need at all higher education institutions. The project will support the design and adoption of novel teaching strategies through faculty training and publicly available resources. The project hopes to achieve three goals: 1) identify and explain psychosocial predictors of student engagement in team learning through student surveys and interviews; 2) articulate and explain differences in student versus instructor perception of team learning through surveys of STEM faculty; and 3) develop, test, evaluate, revise and disseminate a set of practices for culturally responsive team learning. The project uses a novel approach by investigating both individual and cultural psychosocial factors impacting team learning engagement and perception within Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Approach model. While the model has been used extensively in the education field, this project extends it to team learning in STEM. Finally, the project hopes to leverage the research findings to empower faculty to apply a justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion framework to team learning. Through summer institute workshops and a community of practice, STEM faculty will design and implement changes for both online and face-to-face classes. To test model validity, a pre-and post-survey will be administered to students. These results will be paired with faculty self-reflections and formative assessments of team learning to evaluate effectiveness of the teaching modifications and provide a set of recommendations for future practices. The set of recommendations will be disseminated through conference presentations, peer-reviewed papers targeting an interdisciplinary audience, and a website with resources, modules, and rubrics to allow other institutions to use and adapt. The predictive model of effective team learning will benefit the STEM education community by paving the way for further research into culturally competent education. The NSF program description on Advancing Innovation and Impact in Undergraduate STEM Education at Two-year Institutions of Higher Education supports projects that advance STEM education initiatives at two-year colleges. The program description promotes innovative and evidence-based practices in undergraduate STEM education at two-year colleges. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.