Wayne State University (WSU) is a premier urban research institution located in Midtown Detroit. Our student body is over 27,000 strong, but atypical of most research universities. Our students are older (median age of undergraduates ~24), more diverse (35% from underrepresented groups), and more likely to be economically challenged (48% Pell eligible) than a typical research university. Many of our students work full-time while in school and have a host of family and other responsibilities on top of their studies. It is our mission to serve these students by providing them the best possible education. That said, the university faces challenges for its modest graduation rate and significant gap in graduation rates and other metrics of academic achievement between majority and minority students.

It is well documented that a collection of pedagogical practices when effectively implemented lead to improved student learning. These evidence based practices come in many flavors, but what they have in common is the manner in which they promote student engagement with the course material, regardless of what the discipline or subject matter is. The first goal of the WSU-WIDER project was to understand the current pedagogical practices of Wayne State University STEM faculty. Then, based on that knowledge, determine what support structures and pedagogical development was necessary to help our faculty adopt evidence-based instructional practices. Finally, we would pilot those activities and begin to measure their effective implementation. As a two-year program, we had no illusion that we would completely transform the way in which Wayne State faculty taught, but it would start the conversation and initiate the process of galvanizing teams that would do the longer-term heavy lifting of supporting student learning through the use of evidence-based teaching methods.

Using a variety of survey tools, we assessed the faculty attitudes and approaches to teaching at the outset of this project. While we saw some disciplinary differences, they were not profound. What we learned was that faculty had a pretty sizeable knowledge gap regarding evidence-based teaching and were unaware of many of the methods nor did they know the evidence that such methods improved student learning. Thus, the initial workshops had to be introductions to the methods and the evidence behind their success. As the project progressed, we added additional workshops to the lineup including ones on exam design, facilitating group discussion, and teaching hybrid and online classes. Each workshop is led in a way to model the behaviors associated with the topic or method and deconstructed for the faculty participants.

Alongside the workshops, we also began to pilot departmental curricular reform efforts. Physics volunteer to be our first team with a redesign of their 2-term introductory sequence to incorporate more group work and workshop-style teaching. This project involved a team of about 6 faculty across the different sections and a host of graduate teaching assistants. The results of these efforts showed increasing course performance, reduced D, F and W grades and greater persistence from the first semester into the second semester. Finally, interviews with the students indicated a much higher degree of satisfaction and a increased desire to take additional physics courses in the future – all highly positive outcomes.

The grant also supported a rapid expansion of the learning assistant (LA) program on campus. Prof. Karen Myhr from the WIDER team specifically developed a training program that helped new faculty incorporate LAs into their courses and helped to standardize the implementation so that the barriers to using LAs were decreased.  Thus, with the LAs, faculty felt that there was greater support in the classroom to use group work and other interactive pedagogies.

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