The Discipline-Based Science Education Research Center (dB-SERC) has awarded 14 Course Transformation Awards to faculty in natural sciences and economics for this year.

Since 2014, dB-SERC has supported natural science faculty members in developing projects that intend to bring innovation to teaching and learning in the natural sciences. These projects seek to transform the way classes are taught by adopting evidence-based teaching practices to improve student learning outcomes in these departments.

Recipients receive funds for equipment, student support or summer salary for faculty. dB-SERC also gave out one mentor-mentee award to support classroom innovation projects conducted by students and faculty working together.

Course Transformation Awards

Improving sense of belonging in Natural Sciences by implementing inclusive active learning modules, David Outomuro and Rory Carroll, Department of Biological Sciences

The aim of this project is to empower students with knowledge, validation and sense of belonging in natural sciences by implementing inclusive active teaching practices in the undergraduate course Ecology. The specific goals are to incorporate inclusive active learning modules in the form of flipped classes, aligned with course content on global ecological issues; and to add an innovative module aligned with course content on reproductive strategies that challenges the traditional perception of gender and sex and gender roles.

Providing students in research methods a choice between learning styles: “Flip It and Reverse It,” Ben Rottman, Department of Psychology

This project focuses on transforming Research Methods, a vital, large-enrollment course for the Psychology major, by offering students a choice between flipped active-learning and traditional courses.  In the current active-learning approach, approximately 60 percent of the students say they prefer this style, but about 40 percent do not. The central goal for this project is to create two different versions of the class and examine motivational and learning outcomes across these two sections.

Developing scientific writing abilities in honors general chemistry, Eugene Wagner, Department of Chemistry

The goal of this project is to adapt resources and teaching methods from a previous course transformation that aimed to improve scientific writing skills in the senior level physical chemistry course. Students may benefit from developing writing skills early in their major, so this transformation will adapt the previous resources for the first-year honors general chemistry courses. Because this new course has a larger enrollment than physical chemistry, this transformation will implement interactive videos with guided worksheets, which will be developed and created to provide a uniform and sustainable curriculum.

Candle in the Dark: Helping students discard epistemically unwarranted beliefs through scaffolding, discussion, and self-reflection, Melanie Good and Eric Swanson, Department of Physics and Astronomy 

This project aims to uncover and understand pseudoscientific beliefs held by students in order to address such beliefs. This will involve surveying students about their beliefs about pseudoscience, paranormal and conspiracy theory claims. Then, active learning modules will be developed to directly confront students’ epistemically unwarranted beliefs. 

Help me help you: Enhancing student perception and usage of office hours, Dan Wetzel, Department of Biological Sciences

Office hours provide a space for mentoring and student engagement. There is evidence of positive relationships between office hours participation and academic performance, as well as academic identity and motivation. However, in many cases, office hours are underutilized, particularly by students that could benefit the most from them. This project proposes a pilot intervention associated with office hours practices. It will leverage data collected from student surveys to design and implement four interventions to address the most commonly reported barriers to office hours usage. The goals of this transformation are to improve the usage, perception, and value of office hours; and increase student perceived self-efficacy and motivation.

The Implementation of an example-based concept map intervention for Introduction to Psychology students to enhance learning and connectedness in the course, Jennifer Cousins, Department of Psychology

This project will integrate two previous projects that enhanced students’ learning outcomes through individualized concept maps and evaluated the use of content relevant examples and stories during lecture to help the students learn the material, and be engaged in the classroom.  This project will develop formative assessments that allow the students to create a concept map on a topic presented in lecture by incorporating examples used in class and then creating their own examples to represent the topic. The goal is to create an assessment that enhances student learning and students’ connection to the class.

Mastery-based grading in Honors Physics, David Nero, Department of Physics and Astronomy 

Enrollment in the two-term sequence of Honors Physics 1 and 2 (PHYS 0475 and PHYS 0476, respectively) has been declining. To reverse this trend, this project aims to redefine the culture around these courses. The main source of stress inherent to a STEM class is high-stakes testing, so in the transformed class, in place of midterm exams, the vast majority of the summative assessment will take the form of weekly “checkpoints” (quizzes) that test for proficiency in the learning objectives at each of the levels of Marzano’s taxonomy: Retrieval, Comprehension, Analysis, and Knowledge Utilization. Including questions at a range of levels is meant to ensure that the breadth of student learning is being measured.  To foster an environment of self-motivation and improvement, students will be invited to repeat a checkpoint up to a total of three times, although the questions on each attempt will be unique. Scores will be determined by the best attempt, and students may skip the following attempts once they are happy with their score.

Mastery-based grading in General Chemistry 1, Sean Garrett-Roe, Department of Chemistry

 Rather than focusing on growth as a learner, traditional grading incentivizes a grade focus in which students try to maximize the points for the minimum of effort, independent of learning. This hypothesis is based on results from earlier course transformations and the demonstrated effectiveness of specifications grading and standards-based grading in other General Chemistry courses. The specific goals for this project are to expand the question bank for General Chemistry 2 and create a web platform for validated instructors to obtain and customize assessments.  A graphical front-end will be developed so it is easier for instructors to build customized assessments for selected learning objectives and levels, so that question bank is more accessible to instructors.

Developing interactive digital resources using the HTML5 Package (H5P) educational technology to enhance instruction in undergraduate general anatomy and neuroanatomy laboratories, Burhan Gharaibeh, Department of Biological Sciences, and Erika E. Fanselow, Department of Neuroscience

Interactive online materials are superior to conventional didactic teaching methods, but suitable resources are scarce or inadequate for undergraduate anatomy courses and can be technically complex to implement and integrate into learning management systems. Therefore, this project aims to develop a new anatomy teaching resource using the HTML5 Package educational technology. This technology can be used to create a wide range of engaging, interactive learning and assessment methods that will be a substantial improvement over more static, staid teaching methods. There are three goals for this project. First, to create a versatile, interactive online resource for teaching anatomy courses. Second, to determine whether the implementation of H5P instructional materials increases student engagement and performance and reduces student anxiety about learning anatomy. And finally, to evaluate these resources as a method to create, share, and reuse content that can be flexibly adapted for multiple anatomy courses with different levels of difficulty and depth of content.

Using student-led engagement with journal articles and their authors to increase student self-efficacy and belonging, Jessica F. Stephenson, Department of Biological Sciences

It is well known that engaging with primary scientific literature as well as the researchers interacting with students about their work have substantial benefits for undergraduate students.  Videoconferencing makes bringing researchers into the classroom manageable across course types and empowers students to engage with primary research.  This project aims to collect survey data which measures the impact of researcher interactions on student self-efficacy and belongingness. Additionally, this project aims to incorporate more researchers from identities historically excluded from STEM, and to investigate if more researcher diversity can affect student outcomes.

Co-remediation for Econ 1100: Intermediate Microeconomics, Katherine Wolfe and Kevin Shaver, Department of Economics

In Economics, the high-DFW-rate, gatekeeping courses are the intermediate theory courses such as Intermediate Microeconomic Theory.  Putting the most difficult course later in the curriculum worsens issues of over-persistence in the major and delays graduation for students who do not succeed in those courses and need to switch majors.  This project aims to design and implement an intervention for Intermediate Micro course to improve these student outcomes. Instructors have identified weak problem solving, abstract reasoning, and math skills as the main reason why students do poorly in the course. Research on co-remediation courses for introductory college-level math courses has shown that co-remediation leads to better learning outcomes and completion rates. This project will add a 1 credit co-remediation workshop for Econ 1100: “Skills for economic modeling” to the curriculum to improve the relevant math and problem-solving skills of at-risk students.

Peer-Driven BIOSC UTA training: Enhancing student learning in large introductory biology with evidence-based asynchronous peer-driven UTA training, Saoirse S. McSharry, Department of Biological Sciences

Implementation of the large-enrollment introductory biology courses relies on undergraduate teaching assistants (UTAs). In this project, a student-centered asynchronous Peer-Driven UTA Training Module would ensure the UTAs are well-prepared for their roles in the Department of Biological Sciences. The work proposed here seeks to parallel the benefits of near-peer mentoring within UTA training by creating a new asynchronous, student-centered Peer-Driven UTA Training Module that faculty may customize based on their needs. With this work, the goal is to create student-centered Peer-Driven UTA pedagogical content, optimize delivery of content for the online modality, disseminate a pilot of the customizable course to all introductory biology faculty, assess the effectiveness of our module, and make revisions for scale-up.

Scaling up an Ecological-Belonging intervention to foster equity and inclusion in introductory economics courses, Kevin R. Binning, Department of Psychology, and Jane Caldwell, Department of Economics

This project seeks support to scale-up a classroom-based, ecological-belonging intervention across Introductory Economics courses at Pitt. This intervention has shown efficacy across several courses and contexts, both at Pitt and at other four-year universities around the country. Namely, the intervention has effectively promoted equity in course outcomes by reducing demographic disparities in course grades.  This project seeks to establish infrastructure in the Economics Department to support the training and delivery of this intervention across all introductory Micro- and Macroeconomics courses in perpetuity. This will require recruiting a graduate student-lead and devising training and resources to support the continued delivery of the intervention, both in 2023-2024 and in future semesters.

Development of a Rigorous Quantum Mechanics Course for First‐Year Undergraduates, Jeremy Levy, Department of Physics and Astronomy

 Quantum mechanics (QM) is generally agreed to be a highly challenging subject, one that is usually introduced to students as a capstone course in their 3rd or 4th year as undergraduates, and has may prerequisites.  Because QM is central not only to physics, but to chemistry, materials science, and the growing field of quantum information science, there is a great incentive to devise ways to teach this subject at an earlier stage of a student’s education. This project aims to teach rigorous QM to first and second-year undergraduates while removing calculus and differential equations. Linear algebra and so-called “Dirac notation”, which are in fact critical for learning QM, are introduced by strengthening ties with vector spaces in two dimensions, a construct that is used extensively in introductory physics. By emphasizing two-dimensional quantum systems, many of the important features of QM can be illustrated including quantum measurement, dynamics, superposition, entanglement, and so forth.

Mentor/Mentee Award

Enhancing leadership and facilitation skills in STEM (ELFSS): An adapted ELIPSS protocol for improving feedback to undergraduates-teaching undergraduates

Mentor: Sean Garrett-Roe / Mentees: Sarah Craig, Department of Chemistry

In this project, the course instructor and experienced graduate teaching assistants will provide undergraduates-teaching-undergraduates (UTUs) feedback based upon rubrics designed as part of Enhancing Learning by Improving Process Skills in STEM (ELIPSS) protocol throughout a semester of a large-enrollment POGIL-style (Process Oriented Guided Inquiry Learning) General Chemistry 1 course. Progression of active learning behaviors will be quantitatively compared between groups led by a subset of UTUs given improved ELFSS-specific feedback and a control group of UTUs given generic feedback. The hope is that this study will reveal a facile and generalizable scheme for systematic development of UTU facilitation skills.