Reducing Equity Gaps in STEM Group

Reducing Equity Gaps in STEM Group

Spearheaded by Distinguished Teaching Professor Mike Price, this group is built around concrete work to close equity gaps in 100- and 200-level STEM courses. Faculty fellows make changes to improve their own large-enrollment courses and will develop tools and strategies to improve courses throughout their discipline.

Learn more about REGS

• REGS is a Community
• REGS is Action-Oriented
• REGS is Data-Informed

Throughout an academic year REGS fellows made updates to a 100- or 200-level large enrollment course they teach. 

• In the Fall term, fellows examined equity data from their course, shared teaching ideas and practices, and looked at research-informed teaching practices to reduce equity-gaps in their courses.
• In the Winter Term, fellows redesigned course materials in alignment with the menu.
• In the Spring term, fellows shared their updated material with colleagues in their home departments - other faculty who teach different sections of their course, other courses in the same sequence, or their whole department. 

The teaching practices informing the changes made by REGS fellows come from a menu of equity minded practices developed by TEP.

While you may have specific content or learning objectives set for a course, you have a lot of flexibility in how you present that content. The materials students use, examples you demonstrate, and resources you share can be made inclusive while covering exactly the same course content.

1. Build flexibility into course content and structure by allowing room to (i) adapt content to new contexts or examples and (ii) adjust teaching plans or methods based on student feedback.
2. Consider how student identity and ability might shape participation patterns in your course. Use structure and multiple options for engagement to support universal participation.
3. Adopt an open educational resource in place of a textbook or software students must buy.
4. Choose course materials with representational diversity in authors, experts, and contexts and highlight disciplinary experts in your field who hold underrepresented identities.
5. Design your Canvas site to be easily and consistently navigable.
6. Format materials (Canvas, slides, documents, etc.) to be digitally accessible to all. Provide captions and/or transcripts for videos and audio clips. Ensure text is large enough to read.
7. Provide multiple ways to access materials, such as audio, visual, or text-based media.

View resources for planning your course with equity at its core.

How you evaluate the success of your students in meeting your learning objectives can support student learning without sacrificing rigor. Giving students clear objectives, opportunities to practice, and assignments that appropriately measure your course learning objectives helps ensure all students have the opportunity to succeed.

8. Align your assessments and grading structure to growth mindset approach: decrease use of high-stakes exams, increase no/low stakes formative assessments, evaluate students based on individual achievement of learning objectives not in comparison to their peers (e.g. do not curve grades to fit a desired distribution).
9. Make the purpose and value of your course and the activities and assessments transparent: have meaningful learning objectives and clearly convey the purpose, task, and criteria for success on assignments.
10. Ensure there is direct alignment between assessments, learning objectives, and the learning tasks that prepare students for assessment.
11. Use formative assessments to elicit student thinking and gather information that allows the instructor to adapt to student needs and allows students to see what skills still need practice.
12. Use frequent low-stakes assessments and choose varied formats for the assessments.

View resources for using assessments that support learning.

Does being a professional in your discipline depend solely on a person's innate talents, or a skill set that can be developed? We hope you agree with the latter—so communicate that vision to your students! An instructor holding this view is is one the strongest predictors of student achievement and motivation [2].

13. Use language in your syllabus, assignment directions, and when talking about how people become experts in your discipline to emphasize all learners can develop skills and knowledge over time.
14. Frame adversity as common and temporary. Encourage students to seek support and persist in overcoming challenges. Humanize this with your experiences with adversity and with early-term narratives about how students succeed in the course through hard work.
15. Use metacognitive assignments to create opportunities for students to write/reflect on their own learning and on the relevance of course or task to their own goals and life.
16. Attend to and address cues that send negative messages about who can succeed in STEM. Take care to avoid using stereotyping language and address microaggressions if they occur.

View resources for practicing and promoting a growth mindset.

Your most frequent interaction with students is in the classroom. What you, and they, do in the room can invite students into the course and the content or push them away. Ensuring students can be involved and can see themselves in the content brings them deeply into your class.

17. Engage students in constructing their own knowledge through active learning.
18. Engage students through multiple modes of learning, such as lecture, discussion, group work, case studies, guest presenters, video, etc.
19. Structure your course so that each class includes elements of simple pre-class work and in-class activities that apply primary concepts to higher-order thinking skills.
20. “Scaffold” student learning by breaking activities, examples, audio-visual aids, etc. down into smaller steps.
21. Provide community-building opportunities for students, both ones that are content-centered (e.g. working in small groups) and brief ones that allow for structured but more purely social interaction.
22. Use photos, examples, and other representations that reflect diverse social identities and experiences.
23. Develop course content by drawing on relevant scholarly works, including current research/developments in the field or discipline.
24. Learn about your students through a survey or institutional data. Connect class content to their prior knowledge or experiences, current events, real-world phenomena, or other disciplines. 

View resources for leading classes that invite all students in.

In addition to our menu being infused with research-informed teaching practices, REGS collaborated with Austin Hocker, the Assistant Vice Provost for Data & Decision Support. Dr. Hocker provided course-level data to help REGS fellows see trends in student success rates in their courses, including data disaggregated by BLNP (Black, Latinx, Native American and Pacific Islander) identity, sex, first-generation status and Pell eligibility to help faculty notice where equity gaps in course outcomes exist between student populations. Dr. Hocker invited our REGS fellows to dig deeper into their course data with him, including looking at assignment-level achievement data to target specific places equity gaps may arise. 

Our equity-minded approach to this data recognizes that equity gaps result from course, unit, and campus policies and practices that can shift to broaden student success [3]. 

Citations for this page

1. National Academies (2025). Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Supporting Equitable and Effective Teaching. Washington DC: The National Academies Press.
2. Muenks, K., Canning, E. A., LaCosse, J., Green, D. J., Zirkel, S., Garcia, J. A., & Murphy, M. C. (2020). Does My Professor Think My Ability Can Change? Students’ Perceptions of Their STEM Professors’ Mindset Beliefs Predict Their Psychological Vulnerability, Engagement, and Performance in Class. Journal of Experimental Psychology, 149(11), 2119–2144.
3. Center for Urban Education (2020). Equity-minded inquiry series: Data Tools. Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.

More supporting literature for the REGS menu can be found on our REGS Menu Support Resources page.