Goals for this semester:

• Identify (and later, evaluate) resources and initiatives at KCC that support student success in STEM
• Identify opportunities for research projects assessing the effectiveness of these resources and initiatives
• Produce a report summarizing our findings (and figure out to whom we can present it)

Today’s discussion:

• We reviewed the 2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report: “Indicators for Monitoring Undergraduate STEM Education” (Table S-1 on pp.5-7). Read online or download for free at:

https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24943/indicators-for-monitoring-undergraduate-stem-education

• We adopted the three goals in this table to guide our work, revising the wording of goal 3. Goals for our planned work now read as follows:
  • Increase students’ mastery of STEM concepts and skills by engaging them in evidence-based STEM practices and programs
  • Strive for equity, diversity, and inclusion of STEM students and instructors
  • Ensure adequate preparation for STEM careers
• We developed specific research questions we would like to answer (based on the goals). These questions will guide our data gathering.
  • What are the evidence-based educational practices used by faculty in STEM disciplines?
  • To what extent are such practices in use?
  • What programs do we have at KCC to increase academic readiness, gateway course completion, retention, and transfer in STEM majors?
  • What programs, policies, and initiatives exist at KCC to promote equity, diversity, and inclusion in STEM?
• We agreed that the objectives and indicators in Table S-1 reflect our intent, and we intend to gather data for each of these indicators.
• Data will be gathered from the following three sources:
  • Faculty survey (Loretta will develop questions for survey)
  • KCC’s Office of Institutional Effectiveness (Kristin will send requests to Chris Calienes)
  • Relevant administrators (diversity officers, ATD, Academic Affairs, etc) (Mary will request from diversity, Kristin will request from ATD through Chris Calienes)

At our first meeting this fall on Sept 26, we continued to work on the goals developed last semester:

• Identify and evaluate resources and initiatives at KCC that support student success in STEM
• Identify opportunities for research projects assessing the effectiveness of these resources and initiatives
• Produce a report summarizing our findings (and figure out to whom we can present it)

During the meeting we discussed a summary of the following report, which may be interesting to all undergraduate STEM educators:

2018 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report: “Indicators for Monitoring Undergraduate STEM Education.” Read online or download for free at:                https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24943/indicators-for-monitoring-undergraduate-stem-education

In addition, we distributed the following information about an online homework manager, which may be a helpful tool for STEM faculty.

Online Homework Manager or OHM is a technology platform designed to support auto-graded assessments for students which are aligned and integrated with peer-reviewed Open Educational Resource (OER) based textbooks in use by thousands of math instructors.  While OHM’s capabilities are similar to more traditional publisher platforms, such as MyMathLab, it use of OER content and open-source software results in dramatically lower cost ($25 per student).  A partial list of mathematics courses currently supported in OHM can be found on our public course catalog which include links to the full textbooks. You can get a brief overview of OHM using this short demonstration video or reading about it.

OHM is now in wide scale use at both LaGuardia Community College and Hunter College in the CUNY system as both institutions have moved all of their introductory math courses over to OER using it.  Through this work both institutions will save CUNY students over $1 million this year in textbook costs.