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 will enact new methods to improve their own large-enrollment courses and will develop tools and strategies to improve courses throughout their discipline.
Participants
| Facilitators | Fellows | Friends and Collaborators |
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Meeting Calendar
Fall 2024
During the fall, we will work to understand the current lay of the land at UO and within our own classes. Faculty will look ahead at what changes they make to start reduce equity gaps in their own courses.
October 1: Introduction and Understanding Equity Gaps at UO
October 15: Menu of Practices and Plan for Peer Observations
November 19: Debrief of Peer Observations
December 3: Looking to the Winter Term
Winter 2025
During the winter term, faculty will be beginning to implement changes. During our meetings, we will check in on progress, share ideas, and beginning planning how to disseminate ideas to home departments.
Meeting dates and topics TBD.
Spring 2025
During the spring term, we will focus on moving beyond our individual classrooms. Developing plans and materials to close equity gaps across home disciplines.
Meeting dates and topics TBD.
Menu of Equity-Minded Practices
This menu of practices is informed by UO's definition of Inclusive Teaching, TEPs prior work on campus-wide equity efforts, and by the National Academies' forthcoming report on Equitable and Effective Teaching in Undergraduate STEM Education. It contains four key pillars along with faculty practices that support each pillar. The pillars are:
- Plan Your Course with Equity at its Core
- Use Assessments that Support Students
- Practice and Promote a Growth Mindset
- Lead Classes that Invite In All Students
In the menu below each item references supporting literature that can be found below each pillar's table of practices.
Linked here is a one-page version of the menu as a Word Doc.
Plan Your Course with Equity at its Core
While you may have specific content or learning objectives set for a course, how you present that content has a lot of flexibility. The materials students use, examples you demonstrate, and resources you share can be made inclusive while covering exactly the same course content.
| Practice | Supporting Literature |
|---|---|
| 1. Build flexibility into course content and structure by allowing room to adapt content to new contexts or examples and adjusting teaching plans or methods based on student feedback. | Chase (2020) Gube & Lajoie (2020) |
| 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. | Aguillon et al (2020) Gin et al (2020) |
| 3. Adopt an open educational resource in place of a textbook or software students must buy. | Colvard et al (2018) |
| 4. Choose course materials with representational diversity in authors, experts, and contexts and highlight disciplinary experts in your field who hold underrepresented identities. | Brady et al (2020) Schinske et al (2016) |
| 5. Design your Canvas site to be easily and consistently navigable. | Davies et al (2013) Orndorf et al (2022) |
| 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 sufficiently large. | Hogan & Sathy (2022, Ch 5) Izzo & Bauer (2015) Orndorf et al (2022) |
| 7. Provide multiple ways to access materials, such as audio, visual, or text-based media. | Davies et al (2013) |
| Literature on Inclusive Content and Course Structure |
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Use Assessments that Support Students
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.
| Practice | Supporting Literature |
|---|---|
| 1. Align your assessments and grading structure to growth mindset approach: remove grading curves, decrease use of high-stakes exams, increase no/low stakes formative assessments. | Addy et al (2021) Cotner & Ballen (2017) |
| 2. Make the purpose and value of your course and the activities and assessments transparent, including by having meaningful learning objectives and articulating the purpose, task, and criteria for success of assignments. | Palmer et al (2018) Winkelmes et al (2019) |
| 3. Ensure your assessments are an extension of your learning objectives and directly connected to and scaffolded by prior student work. | Fink (2013) Wiggins & McTighe (2005) |
| 4. Use formative assessments to elicit student thinking and gather information that allows the instructor to adapt to student needs. | Lyle et al (2020) Prince et al (2020) |
| 5. Use frequent low-stakes assessments and choose varied formats for the assessments. | Brown et al (2014) Warnock (2013) |
| Literature on Inclusive Assessment Methods |
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Practice and Promote a Growth Mindset
Is being a scientist an innate property of a person, or a skill set that can be developed? We hope you agree with the latter—so communicate that vision within your students! An instructor holding this view is is one the strongest predictors of student achievement and motivation (Muenks, et al, 2020).
| Practice | Supporting Literature |
|---|---|
| 1. 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. | Canning et al (2019) Canning et al (2021) Fuesting et al (2019) Muenks et al (2020) |
| 2. 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. | Hogan & Sathy (2022, Ch 3) Kroeper et al (2022) Walton et al (2023) Yeager & Dweck (2012) |
| 3. 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. | Ertmer & Newby (1996) Harackiewicz et al (2016) Tanner (2012) |
| 4. 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. | Harrison & Tanner (2018) Rydell et al (2010) |
| Literature on Inclusive Faculty and Student Mindsets |
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Lead Classes that Invite All Students In
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.
| Practice | Supporting Literature |
|---|---|
| 1. Engage students in constructing their own knowledge through active learning. | Cooper & Brownell (2016) Cooper et al (2018) Dewsbury et al (2022) Haak et al (2011) |
| 2. Engage students through multiple modes of learning, such as lecture, discussion, story telling, group work, case studies, guest presenters, video, etc. | Abrahamson (1998) Herreid (2007) Nilson (2010) Tanner (2013) |
| 3. 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. | Eddy & Hogan (2014) Haak et al (2011) |
| 4. Employ methods (activities, examples, audio-visual aids) broken down into steps to “scaffold” student learning. | Ambrose et al (2010, Ch 5) |
| 5. Provide community-building opportunities for students, both ones that are task-based (e.g. working in small groups) and brief ones that allow for structured but authentic interaction. | Dasgupta et al (2015) Deslauriers et al (2011) Eddy et al (2014) |
| 6. Use photos, examples, and other representations that reflect diverse social identities and experiences. | White et al (2020) |
| 7. Develop course content by drawing on relevant scholarly works, including current research/developments in the field or discipline. | Ambrose et al (2010, Ch 1) |
| 8. Use a survey or data about students’ backgrounds to connect class content to their prior knowledge or experiences, current events, real-world phenomena, or other disciplines. | Ambrose et al (2010, Ch 1, 3 & 4) Barnes & Brownell (2017) Booker & Campbell-Whatley (2018) Estefan et al (2023) |
| Literature on Inclusive In-class Practices |
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Observations
During the fall term, REGS fellows will observe one another's classes to provide feedback and insight on inclusive and effective practices from the REGS menu.
We are also collaborating with Distinguished Teaching Professor Katie Lynch as she launches a Pedagogical Partners program at UO. Some members of the first cohort will partner with faculty in the REGS group, offering student's-eye-views of new strategies fellows are enacting.
A Data-Informed Approach
Our work is in collaboration with Austin Hocker, the Assistant Vice Provost for Data & Decision Support, who has 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 invites our REGS group members 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. [Center for Urban Education (2020)].
Center for Urban Education. (2020). Equity-minded inquiry series: Data Tools. Rossier School of Education, University of Southern California.
Are you a member of our REGS group? You can connect to our group Teams page below.