As higher education institutions look to educate and graduate degree earners that have the skills and knowledge necessary to design, communicate, and collaborate in ways that allow for innovative solutions to complex socio-technical challenges, new approaches to educational efforts are being considered and implemented. Institutional responses have…

Although online courses have been a part of academia for nearly 30 years, they are still perceived as "different" than face-to-face instruction. Through in-depth interviews with four instructors, we explored how STEM faculty approach teaching asynchronous online undergraduate STEM courses. The faculty interviewed for this study viewed…

Learning communities for college students have been shown to improve first-year student outcomes and narrow equity gaps, but longer-term data to evaluate whether these benefits persist through multi-year retention and graduation are rare. This is especially important for students in science, technology, engineering and math, who often confront…

Collective impact is an organizational model that is often used as a tool for solving complex social problems through cross-sector collaboration. Traditional applications of this model require a separate backbone organization to oversee the organizational partnership. Using qualitative data from a larger mixed methods study, we examined…

Grant funding is essential to the advancement of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields with certain grants viewed as especially prestigious and career formative. The goal of this project was twofold: first to describe the gender demographics of the national winners of two prestigious grants and second, to document the impact of…

This study examined the relationships between first-year university students' academic motivation, retrospective evaluation of school experiences, subjective well-being, engagement and intention to drop out. Self-determination theory, the SInAPSi model of academic engagement, the hedonic approach, and the retrospective judgment process were used…

Instructional reform in STEM aims for the widespread adoption of evidence based instructional practices (EBIPS), practices that implement active learning. Research recognizes that faculty social networks regarding discussion or advice about teaching may matter to such efforts. But teaching is not the only priority for university faculty -- meeting…

Despite the documented negative outcomes accompanying sexual harassment, the experience of sexual harassment among STEM faculty members remains underexamined. In this paper, we explore how two sexual harassment variables--gender harassment and sexual harassment climate--are linked to four facets of faculty well-being: job burnout, turnover…

Despite Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) advancements, general faculty adoption of effective teaching strategies has been slow, especially within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. One solution has been to focus on preparing future faculty. The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and…

There to date exists limited research on how emotion regulation shapes students' emotional experiences and academic development in higher education. The purpose of this study was to address this gap by examining how students in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) degree programs (N = 174) use emotion regulation strategies related to…

It is estimated that over a third of college students switch majors at least once (Astorne-Figari & Speer, Economics of Education Review 70:75-93, 2019), but the impact of this switching behavior on students' pathways towards a science, technology, engineering, or math (STEM) degree are not well understood. In this study, using panel data from…

The underrepresentation of women faculty in the STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) remains a persistent feature of academia, with turnover being a contributing factor. The departmental context is likely implicated in the decision to stay or leave, as it is one of the key defining features of faculty members' work…

Despite the broad scope of literature on the topic of women in STEM, women in male-dominated spaces within academia are rarely given the opportunity to speak openly about their disadvantages in the toxic STEM culture. The current study implements a Critical Utopian Action Research method, Future Creating Workshop (FCW), with undergraduate women in…

Rapid advances in the quality and accessibility of immersive virtual reality (IVR) have brought about intense interest in applications of the technology within higher education, including STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) teaching and learning. However, evidence is mixed on the effectiveness of IVR for STEM teaching and…

Traditional approaches to teaching and learning in large undergraduate STEM lectures has not kept pace with the massification and diversification of higher education. Efforts to alleviate learning obstacles call for improved instruction, stipulating the utility of specific pedagogical techniques delineated as "promising practices";…