
NSF Org: |
EES Div. of Equity for Excellence in STEM |
Recipient: |
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Initial Amendment Date: | June 16, 2018 |
Latest Amendment Date: | May 30, 2024 |
Award Number: | 1759947 |
Award Instrument: | Standard Grant |
Program Manager: |
Jessie Dearo
jdearo@nsf.gov (703)292-5350 EES Div. of Equity for Excellence in STEM EDU Directorate for STEM Education |
Start Date: | July 15, 2018 |
End Date: | June 30, 2024 (Estimated) |
Total Intended Award Amount: | $1,103,645.00 |
Total Awarded Amount to Date: | $1,249,830.00 |
Funds Obligated to Date: |
FY 2019 = $146,185.00 |
History of Investigator: |
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Recipient Sponsored Research Office: |
5250 CAMPANILE DR SAN DIEGO CA US 92182-1901 (619)594-5731 |
Sponsor Congressional District: |
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Primary Place of Performance: |
CA US 92182-4611 |
Primary Place of
Performance Congressional District: |
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Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): |
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Parent UEI: |
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NSF Program(s): | ECR-EDU Core Research |
Primary Program Source: |
04001920DB NSF Education & Human Resource |
Program Reference Code(s): |
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Program Element Code(s): |
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Award Agency Code: | 4900 |
Fund Agency Code: | 4900 |
Assistance Listing Number(s): | 47.076 |
ABSTRACT
This study will investigate the factors that facilitate or hinder STEM undergraduate instructors from implementing strategies that have demonstrably positive impacts on student outcomes. The research will specifically focus on the study of one such intervention called the Utility Value Intervention (UVI), which has been shown to have a positive impact especially on students who are first generation college students or who are from racial and ethnic minority groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. The UVI helps students to discover connections between science topics and their lives, and to make connections between STEM topics they are studying and their goals. Making these connections helps students appreciate the value of the work, leading to a deeper engagement and involvement which, in turn, enhances career motivation and performance. The proposed research focuses on understanding why faculty decide to adopt intervention strategies such as the UVI or not.
The study is framed by organizational theories of diversity resistance and social psychological theories of decision making. The project team will collect data from over 800 undergraduate biology instructors from a nationally representative sample. This will be complemented by interviews with 40 introductory biology instructors and field experiments with 624 biology instructors to understand attitudes toward adopting or resisting diversity-focused interventions. In later years of the project, the investigators will conduct a randomized controlled trial testing the optimized intervention delivery methods with a new nationally representative sample of 200 biology instructors. This project is supported by the Education and Human Resources Core Research Program, which funds fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.
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.
PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH
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PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT
Disclaimer
This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.
The science education community is deeply vested in growing the next generation of scientists. One way to do this is through evidence-based interventions that support the motivation and performance of undergraduate students in introductory science classes. Researchers across education and psychology have developed and demonstrated efficacy for many such interventions. Unfortunately, the process of developing and evaluating pedagogical practices is not the same as the process required to scale those efforts into actual implementation within university classrooms. In this project, we examined both barriers to intervention adoption and strategies to facilitate adaption at scale. To do so, we focused on a single intervention, the utility value intervention (UVI), a classroom writing assignment intervention that has strong empirical support for boosting student motivation and performance by helping students see greater value in what they are learning. We collected data from randomly selected biology faculty who teach introductory courses across the United States using interviews, surveys, and experimental methods. In conceiving of implementing an evidence-based intervention as a “helping” behavior, we adapted the classic decision-making model of helping to inform our approach. The main objective was to understand the intervention implementation process, using the UVI as an exemplar intervention – with implications for other evidence-based classroom interventions.
Intellectual Merit: We started by asking the key question: What theory-informed strategies maximize faculty’s positive attitudes toward, and long term adoption of, the utility value intervention within their introductory biology course? Our findings point to specific barriers that make faculty less likely to adopt the UVI in their classroom, even after learning of its benefits. Although faculty widely viewed the UVI as valuable, their perceptions of costs (e.g. to time and trade-offs with investing time relative to other aspects of their work) lowered adoption likelihood. In addition, consistent with our expectations, biology faculty used social cues, or looked to their peers and institutional leaders, to evaluate whether pursuing these kinds of activities was both valued and normative. Through careful experimentation, our results showed three elements that together persuaded biology faculty to adopt the UVI in their classroom in some form: 1) Identify the situation and frame it as urgent 2) Ensure faculty feel responsible and 3) Offers tools and templates so faculty know how to act. These findings led us to identify several important institutional practices and policies that can promote intervention adoption, and we disseminated these lessons via several scholarly publications and presentations.
Broader impacts: Efforts to encourage faculty to adopt successful evidence-based classroom intervention practices often move slowly, through relatively small personal and professional networks. We developed and disseminated a complementary proactive strategy designed to raise awareness of the UVI across a broad swath of U.S. biology faculty. Our strategy resulted in this particular intervention being adopted in some form by more than 4 in 10 of faculty who learned about it, reaching an estimated 7,500 students across the U.S. We have shared this process, along with a detailed guide and ready-to-use resources concrete tools for faculty across a variety of platforms. Our theory-driven approach to finding and engaging science faculty using social psychological principles allows intervention researchers to broaden the reach and scale of their evidence-based efforts maximizing the public good and the public dollar. Our methods and results can serve as a catalyst to meaningfully change science student outcomes and broaden the scientific workforce.
Last Modified: 11/05/2024
Modified by: Dustin B Thoman
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