Hello, I’m Melanie Cooper, PI for the Three-Dimensional Learning for Undergraduate STEM Education (3DL4US) project. 

Thank you for your interest in “Creating a Coherent Gateway to STEM Teaching and Learning”. Our video invites STEM instructors in higher education to envision a framework that prioritizes students using core science ideas in the context of scientific practices and crosscutting concepts- otherwise known as 3-dimensional learning (3DL). Our project has focussed on supporting faculty to develop 3D assessment tasks and associated classroom instruction activities. In this way our STEM fellows can achieve an interactive classroom that is focused on students using their knowledge to develop deep understanding. Our video features a testimonial from one of our fellows, Dr. Kirstin Parkin a professor of Microbiology at Michigan State University, describing the changes she has seen in her classroom as a result of adopting three-dimensional assessments and instruction.

We are excited about this project because it allows faculty to go beyond “active learning” to support the use of knowledge. We are able to assess the impact of the project by the use of the 3D-LAP, an assessment protocol that characterizes course assessments (Characterizing College Science Assessments: The Three-Dimensional Learning Assessment Protocol), and have reported on the initial findings of the project and the factors that appeared to impact its success (Evaluating the extent of a large-scale transformation in gateway science courses)

Some areas we are looking for feedback are:

• How does the idea of “going beyond active learning” resonate with you?

• What are challenges you see with encouraging faculty to implement 3D instruction and assessment?

• What information could we provide that would help in convincing faculty to implement 3D instructions and assessment?

Hi Melanie, This is a very nice project connecting three dimensional learning to Higher Education. The idea of faculty embracing core concept models and then ensuring lesson activities help them build that model are important to "going beyond active learning".

The challenges in encouraging faculty to implement 3D learning is that not all disciplines agree on what their core shared ideas are for content.

We have a sort of similar k9 project posted to the STEMforALL if you want to see our video. It is called EQuIPD: A Model Love Story..

Hi Nancy, thanks for your comments - I really enjoyed your video and seeing the connections we are making all the way through the education system! 

I agree that (particularly in higher education) there is more disciplinary divergence about what constitutes a core idea. In our project we convened groups of disciplinary faculty (from biology, chemistry and physics), and had them discuss what core ideas were central to their discipline. In this way we did get buy-in from faculty. In this project we used these discipline specific core ideas, and the scientific practices and crosscutting concepts developed in the NRC Framework for K-12 Science Education.

Hi Melanie, thanks for sharing an inspirational video.  The idea of "going beyond active learning" is an idea that resonates with me as a high school and middle school teacher.  I often find in my context that students initially like the idea of "learning by doing", but then yearn for a more traditional "chalk talk" class structure as soon as it gets challenging.  Have you encountered this sort of challenge at the university level?

I enjoyed the video and this idea of 3D learning is new to me (thank you!). I'm wondering how we might adapt 3DL for social sciences. As faculty in Communication teaching about the process of communication research, how might I adapt this for my own courses? Is there a template? How scalable is this method?

Hi Melanie, this is a very interesting project and ideology for teaching science. 

I think that it is so important to have that buy-in from faculty, and workshopping to generate a consensus on those core ideas is a great way to do so. This is similar to the cooperative planning I have done with teachers in working collaboratively across disciplines and schools in my project with PBI Global. Even though it takes time and effort, getting everyone together to brainstorm allows the generation of a plan that everyone can support and feel comfortable implementing. Demonstrating that this model can be adapted across the science disciplines and generate increases in achievement is very convincing that it is effective and worthwhile.

If you're interested in how we integrate science content with other disciplines through project-based learning, our video is called Project-Based Inquiry (PBI) Global 2020. 

Great project!  I think it must have taken some courage (?) to bring this to the higher ed community?  It has become a cliche that most faculty are not taught how to teach--so investing in a thoughtful, deliberate, intellectually grounded, evidence-based program of professional development that you have built here for the fellows seems like a very important step forward.  The development of the NGSS was an all-hands-on deck approach to rethinking teaching STEM disciplines--it makes a great deal of sense to use what we learned in developing those standards (practice, disciplinary core ideas, cross cutting concepts) and carry that into post-secondary science teaching. Bravo!

Thanks Nancy - yes this project is different to many professional development programs for faculty in that we are focussing on what students should know and be able to do with that knowledge, and from that, driving student engagement (rather than focussing on engagement without considering content). In fact, because we began by convening faculty to consider what the core ideas of the disciplines might be, we may have been able to achieve more buy-in than if we had begun with professional development on "how to teach." Additionally, several of our initial project leaders were involved with the development of the NGSS, and moving that work into the higher education space made a lot of sense to us.

Thanks--I think faculty discussing "core ideas" is foundational to P-16 or P-20 alignment. And if you have any $$ left (hah!) it would be great to include the HS teachers and teacher educators in on the discussions, also.  (I'm a big P-20 advocate.  I believe we owe it to the kids/students to build coherence into curricula.)

thanks again!

Thank you for the inspiring video!  I especially like how you differentiated active learning from meaningful learning - i.e. just "doing things" is not enough.  I am curious about how you put the three pieces of core ideas, practices, and crosscutting concepts together to implement 3DL in higher ed?  You focus on incorporating science practices, but how do you integrate those with the core and crosscutting concepts?  Thank you for your leadership in bringing 3DL to higher ed!

Hi Nancy. As Debbie and Melanie said, we are actively exploring how we might support high school students in making sense of phenomena in terms of atomic/molecular behavior. Our team includes both veteran high school chemistry teachers and ChemEd researchers. If you are interested in learning more, feel free to send me an email and/or check out our project website here: https://stowe.chem.wisc.edu/hs-clue/

Thank you for sharing your video and project with us!

I was wondering if you would be available for a zoom presentation to talk about this project to our STEM faculty.

Thanks,

Thank you for sharing. Teaching science as scientists think is of critical importance it is shows from your video that it has resulted in improvement in understanding more complex concepts. Regarding your question about encouraging faculty to implement 3D instruction and assessment, how have you successfully convinced professors to do this who are potentially "stuck in their ways"? Specifically, what have you found that works or has not?

This "learning by doing" approach is how we should be teaching all courses at any age level to engage the learning in real world experiences. Great work!

Great work.  And thank you for making your theoretical framework and research objectives clear and sharing with us.  What outcomes are you tracking specifically for teachers? For learners?  

HI Michael. Thanks for your questions. We have been tracking a number of different outcomes. For example we have developed a protocol (the 3D-LAP) that allows us to characterize summative (and formative) assessments as 3D (or not). We have collected course assessments and monitored their percentage of "3D" points. (see .Evaluating the extent of a large-scale transformation in gateway science courses).

We have also been looking at student learning outcomes for specific courses (see for example Reasoning about Reactions in Organic Chemistry) and studies on  mechanistic reasoning across disciplines are underway . Studies are also underway how students perceive of the kinds of thinking they are doing in transformed courses. 

Faculty and STEM Fellows who have participated in this project have been surveyed and interviewed about the factors that affect their adoption of the transformation, and the results of this work will be published in the near future.

Hello!  Nice job on a great topic!  As a high school Chemistry teacher, how would you recommend starting this 3D instruction and assessment before college.  I loved the data about student performance vs years teaching using this method.  How was the data obtained?

Hi Robert 

thanks for your questions. First we have a HS version of the chemistry course that was part of this project. The website for the HS-CLUE project is here (https://stowe.chem.wisc.edu/hs-clue/) (DR-K12 2003680).Our team includes both veteran high school chemistry teachers and ChemEd researchers. The PI on this project is Ryan Stowe at the University of Wisconsin and i know he would be happy to provide you with more details (or I can!).

The data we collected on student performance were obtained from the Registrar's office as aggregated student data (so there are no worries with identification). We also administered a range of different assessments to students and collected those data as well. 

Thanks for sharing this video and for your great questions! I am interested in your second question about assessments. In my experience from my math department, assessment, especially in gateway math courses (pre-calc, calc 1, calc 2), is one of the ever-present challenges we face. 

-What criteria do you use to know whether your assessment items are 3D? (I see you have a linked article but I've not read it yet :). Have you considered if the criteria would look different in mathematics classes?)

-How do your instructors handle the logistics of consistently grading 3D assessment items? (thinking here of both the time to grade, as well as the issue of maintaining inter-rater reliability) 

-What opportunities do you see in the current moment (of remote learning and disruptions to business as usual) to engage in discussions of how to transform assessments? 

As a science teacher educator--I often have to work with science students to understand the importance of active inquiry (3D Learning) for their future high school students when they do not learn science this way at the college level.  Transformation at the university level will hopefully lead to greater science literacy as well as more interest in science careers. Great project!