Resources

This paper examines methods of actively engaging students in online university-level STEM courses. It describes a variety of synchronous and asynchronous engagement strategies, cites research supporting their effectiveness, and offers suggestions for maximizing the effectiveness of active engagement regardless of which strategies are adopted to achieve it.

This article investigates the impact of a social-belonging intervention on anticipated changes in belonging, STEM GPA, and proportion of STEM credits obtained in English as a second language (ESL) students’ first semester and first year of college. Results revealed that the intervention increased ESL students’ anticipated sense of belonging and three of the four academic outcomes.

This report covers trends in and the relative global position of the U.S. S&E enterprise, including education, workforce, R&D, industry output, and innovation.

In this Fast Company article, Pearson’s Milena Marinova explains the calculus barrier to entry-level STEM jobs and the AI solution that could change the game.

U.S. Business leaders cannot find the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) talent they need to stay competitive. Students’ lagging performance in K–12 is a critical reason why. Years of hard work have improved K-12 student performance in math and science, but not fast enough. Programs in STEMworks, CTEq’s honor roll of STEM education programs that have proven their effectiveness, have the potential to address these and other challenges in states across the country.

This brief examines approaches to mitigating and closing STEM enrollment, completion, and performance gaps. It discusses strategies and initiatives that institutions of higher education have implemented to reduce those gaps and the relationship between programs to close equity gaps and efforts to improve STEM pedagogy and curricula more broadly. It also considers how technological change impacts efforts to change the STEM undergraduate learning experience and how new technological tools can support student learning and pedagogical innovation.

This study found that students in active classrooms learned more (as would be expected based on prior research), but their perception of learning, while positive, was lower than that of their peers in passive environments. This suggests that attempts to evaluate instruction based on students’ perceptions of learning could inadvertently promote inferior (passive) pedagogical methods.

The authors quantified classroom practices and related these to student learning. The most significant positive predictor of learning gains was the use of group work, supporting the findings of previous studies. The authors also found that the addition of worksheets as an active learning tool for in-class group activities had the strongest impact on diagnostic test scores. This particular low-tech activity promotes student collaboration, develops problem solving skills, and can be used to inform the instructor about what students are struggling with, thus providing opportunities for valuable and timely feedback.