Facilitating Change in Undergraduate STEM: Initial Results from an Interdisciplinary Literature Review

Although decades of research have identified effective instructional practices for improving Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) education, these practices are not widely implemented. Scholars in three fields are interested in promoting these practices and have engaged in research on pedagogical change: Disciplinary-based STEM Education Researchers, Faculty Development Researchers, and Higher Education Researchers. There is little interaction between the fields and efforts in all areas have met with only modest success. In this paper we present an initial examination of 130 randomly chosen articles from a set of 295 we identified as addressing efforts to promote change in the instructional practices of STEM faculty. We identify four core change strategies and note that change strategies differ by fields. Articles in all fields frequently do not provide enough evidence to convincingly argue for the success of the change strategy studied and have few connections to theoretical or empirical literature related to change. This literature review and related efforts sit within broader efforts to promote interdisciplinary directed at facilitating lasting change.