Surveying Promising Practices

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Moderator Melvin George (University of Missouri) introduced three panelists to discuss a range of promising practices. Each panelist was asked to address the following questions:

1. How would you categorize the range of promising practices that have emerged over the past 20 years? Consider practices that are discipline-specific as well as those that are interdisciplinary.

2. What types of categories do you find are most useful in sorting out the range of efforts that have emerged? Why did you choose tc aggregate certain practices within a category?

3. As you chose exemplars for your categories, what criteria did you use to identify something as a promising practice?

Jeffrey began by describing a frame. work that he developed to categorize promising undergraduate teaching practices in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The framework begins with a set of decisions that faculty members must make in designing a course:

Expectations decision: How will 1 articulate and communicate my expectations for student learning?

Student organization decision: How will students be organized ...
... as they participate in learning activities?

Content organization decision: How will I organize the content for my course? What overarching ideas will I use?

Feedback decision: How will I provide feedback to my students on their performance and growth?

Gathering evidence for grading decision: How will I collect evidence on which I will base the grades I assign?

In-classroom learning activities decision: In what learning activities will students engage during class?

Out-of-classroom learning activities decision: In what learning activities will students engage outside class?

Student-faculty interaction decision: How will I promote student. faculty interaction?

The next component of Jeffrey's framework relates to two types of standards against which faculty members are likely to evaluate a promising practice: (1) implementation standards and (2) impact standards. Implementation standards include the relevance of the promising practice to the course, resource constraints, faculty comfort level, and the theoretical foundation for the promising practice. Student performance standards relate to the available evidence on the effectiveness of the promising practice, which may include comparison studies or implementation studies.

Jeffrey then identified eight promising practices related to teaching in the STEM disciplines and analyzed each in terms of his implementation and student performance standards.

Jeanne (Project Kaleidoscope) identified three characteristics of institutional-level promising practices in STEM, noting that they (1) connect to larger goals for what students should know and be able to do upon graduation, (2) focus on the entire learning experience of the student, and (3) are kaleidoscopic).

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