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Engineering Math (GEEN3830) is a one-semester course that covers topics from Pre-Calc, Calc 1, 2, and Differential Equations through hands-on laboratory exercises and engineering applications – a math class where every problem has units and authentic engineering context. The curriculum for the course was initially created by engineers at Wright State University, where the course is required for all engineering students and has been shown to improve persistence through the required undergraduate math sequence and ultimately engineering degrees. Here at CU, we piloted Engineering Math in Fall 2017 with 22 students, growing to 102 students in Fall 2018. We will discuss our early assessment data and implementation challenges as we are currently deciding how we can tailor the course from both administrative and instructional perspectives to make Fall 2019 the best yet.

The SEI lasted almost 10 years here at CU, from 2006-2014, and at our sister institution U. British Columbia. The SEI has influenced the teaching of 120 courses at UBC and 50 at CU, and has sparked numerous “copycat” programs which use the embedded expert model espoused by the SEI: Hiring postdocs or instructors into departments to partner directly with faculty on making changes to their courses. Carl Wieman wrote a book in 2017, “”, documenting what happened in the SEI. However, myself and the associate director at UBC (Warren Code) often find ourselves trying to advise others using the model, without a clear set of guiding materials.

This led us to write the SEI Handbook to document the lessons learned for campus leaders, departmental leaders, and the embedded experts who lead change within departments. Read or download the SEI Handbook for free online at . Printed copies are also available on .

Why should you come to this DBER? If you are leading a change initiative, we have many transportable “lessons learned” for how to bring adequate attention to the initiative and engage faculty. If you are an instructor or faculty member working with department faculty on course modifications, we have lessons for you. And more broadly, I will share some of the impacts the SEI has had on the national landscape.

The second talk will be given by Sam Flaxman, EBIO Faculty and General Biology Coordinator. Inspired by the work of researchers like Dr. Saundra Yancy McGuire & Dr. Carol Dweck on metacognition and mindset, I attempted to design a metacognitive intervention for students who were performing poorly in my introductory biology class. My challenges for myself were to (1) target students in need of change and (2) do this in a way that was scalable for one person (me) to implement in a class of over 600 students. I'll discuss the ways I attempted to roll this out, the materials I created, and hope to get ideas about how to make this more effective in the future.

Format of talk: Fully interactive: please interrupt me at any time!

What I hope to get out of my talk: I would love to share my experience and get feedback from the community. To be crystal clear - I didn't carry out a DBER study! I developed a new class. But I learned a lot along the way that might be valuable to others in the community. I also suspect that I could learn a lot from the community about how to continue to evolve this course and extend what we have learned to additional courses.

Kind: This is a brand new project and we have not begun collecting data.

Format: Please interrupt with questions and constructive suggestions, keeping in mind that I am most interested in your thoughts on participant selection and recruitment and methodology near the end of my talk.

Goal: I'm interested in your input on our general methodology and suggestions for participant recruitment

I will begin with summarizing our discussion from my previous DBER presentation, about what it means to be scientifically literate. I will then move on to describe our approach to increase and assess scientific literacy, focusing initially on my observations of students' failure to retrieve or apply their content knowledge, failure to correctly justify their answers and their struggle to see the forest for the trees.

See attached for a white paper on Theory of Change by Mark Connolly and (our own) Elaine Seymour.

Research shows that undergraduate student participation in authentic research opportunities (ARO) enhances persistence in STEM fields by strengthening student perceptions of themselves as scientists. Longitudinal studies show that students who participated in an ARO, including members of underrepresented groups, were 14-17% more likely to persist in STEM fields on to graduate school compared with their colleagues who did not. However, these same studies pointed out that, despite the benefits of undergraduate research, the designs of many such research programs have shortcomings that can inhibit wider student participation or even reduce student persistence in the sciences.

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A unique ARO design is currently being piloted within the Department of Geological Sciences that combines the benefits of the faculty-student mentoring and apprenticeship characteristics of an Undergraduate Research Experience with the peer mentoring and guided literature discussion of a Course Undergraduate Research Experience as a collaborative multi-semester undergraduate research community. Undergraduate students participating in the ARO will: 1) conduct independent but interrelated research projects under a large-scale question and ��2) participate in a 1-credit research seminar that will place each student’s project into a broader scientific context by exploring the scientific literature and that will promote each student’s role as a peer mentor and collaborator in answering a larger research question. ��Students are recruited who are at different stages of their career so that the younger students can benefit not only from faculty mentoring, but can also learn from their undergraduate ‘elders’. �� We will discuss the currently model used in this effort and the preliminary results and student attitudes about the project.

Course-based undergraduate research experiences (CUREs) are spreading and being scaled to accommodate more students across the nation. As they expand and gain recognition, more disciplines are seeking to adopt this innovation and make it their own. Thus far, much of the work to define CUREs and explore CURE design has been spearheaded by biologists and chemists who have applied CUREs to their disciplines. For example, a group that defined what they see as five essential CURE elements consisted primarily of researchers from chemistry and biology. Yet, the “essential elements” of research-based experiences that result in desired outcomes for undergraduates may vary by discipline, or even by sub-discipline, since the research goals of each discipline vary.��

I would like to engage the DBER community in a discussion of if and how the essential elements of research-based courses might vary by discipline. For example, during DBER I would like us to explore if a Physics CURE should seek to incorporate different elements than a Biology CURE. I hope that we can have a lively discussion of how research in our disciplines varies and what experiences and outcomes might result from involving students in course-based research in different disciplines.��

In an effort to bring awareness to these thinking patterns and encourage engagement with scientific thinking, we developed a lesson to have students identify��and evaluate their own thinking, and analytically compare their thinking with that of the general population about acceptance of evolution (in general, and specifically about humans).

We will discuss the lesson and explore other ways in which student scientific literacy and metacognitive ability can be strengthened in light of common��pitfalls in thinking (including motivated reasoning).��