Thanks for checking out our video! In our interdisciplinary approach, four faculty members choose separate topics that they're passionate about. We advertise the course to first year and sophomore students but also allow a small number of juniors and seniors to enroll.   

We've been conducting pre/post evaluations via the Science Literacy Concept Inventory and a science attitudes instrument, and we're planning to analyze students' subsequent registration and performance in other science and math courses.

We'd greatly benefit from hearing other assessment suggestions, and we'd love to hear about your interdisciplinary STEM teaching approaches and answer questions about this approach. 

What an interesting and novel apprach! Do you have any preliminary data or outcomes on the pre- and post- survey and STEM retention of the student? 

Thank you for sharing your project! Given the surprise result on the pedagogical development of faculty, are you/do you plan to extend training for faculty?

Thanks for your question! Yes, for each offering of the course, I coordinate a short workshop with the participating faculty.  For instance, we'll meet for two 3-hour mornings in June to begin discussing our module plans for the Fall 2019 offering and potential connections between those modules. Then we meet again at the end of the summer to refresh and finalize those plans as well as discuss details for the first day of class, when we jointly meet with all of the students and introduce the model and purpose of the course.  Our NSF IUSE grant support is ending after this year, but I'll be continuing to offer the course and hold the workshop -- I'd say it's particularly important for faculty who are contributing for the first time, but it also seems to be interesting and worthwhile for faculty who have taught the course before, as they're generally working with at least a partially new set of colleagues, and they feel like they're picking up new pedagogical approaches from each other.    

Love this approach. I particularly appreciate the synthesis week that highlights bringing different fields together. 

Michael:

Love this idea for making gen-ed science more integrative. We do something similar in our intro biology major (2 instructors for different modules), but get complaints from students about switching from instructor to instructor over a semester. Do you see that, or does the joint synthesis session help students get past that?

What an innovative approach to creating an interdisciplinary team that keeps the learner engaged all year. Do you collect feedback from your instructors on how much experience they have with interdisciplinary teaching prior to this course? I like the concept of using these new approaches to introducing faculty to Interdisciplinary teams and providing introductions to the pedagogy. 

That's a great idea -- we don't currently collect that information, but that would be an interesting pre/post as well, and I like your idea of using this kind of approach as a formative introduction.  

Very neat work. It might be instructive to look at how instructors' perceptions of different disciplines are changing as a result of co-teaching.

Also, have you thought about what this might look like in a class designed for junior and seniors?

Thanks for teaching scientific literacy skills.  We need students to know more than just what's in the book!  Helping them learn how to ask and find answers to questions about everyday experiences is also important.  Question: What are the connections between the literacy skills and the modules topics?  Are there projects students design or problems they solve that integrate the literacy skills and the module topics?

Thanks! In recent years, our science and math division at DePauw has roughly agreed to a set of 8 learning goals for our introductory STEM gen ed courses (they're essentially the science literacy skills from Gormally, Brickman, and Lutz, 2012). When we hold the workshop before each semester to coordinate this class, one of our sessions consists of the instructors planning the subset of learning goals that they expect to address in their respective modules.  Instructors don't try to cover every goal within a module, but our intention is to have each learning goal covered by at least 2 modules so that we can encourage students to learn and apply those skills in multiple contexts. As part of that workshop session, we also fill-out a corresponding table of Modules X Learning Goals on a shared Google Sheet with notes so that during the semester, instructors can look back at the table to refresh on their own commitments as well as the ways that colleagues intended to cover those learning goals.  

I'd say that instructors vary substantially in how they integrate those literacy skills in their modules. For example, sometimes they're addressed via short labs/demos/simulations during class time; in other cases, assignments require students to answer questions pertinent to the literacy skills as part of a homework assignment (e.g., I've taught a "complex systems" module where, for one assignment, students choose from a set of agent-based models in Netlogo, experiment with the model and its key variables, and answer a variety of questions relevant to our literacy skills).   

I really liked the purposeful approach to helping students synthesize the information—I actually have a question operationally —Are team taught classes common at your universities?  How do people get “credit” for teaching in a team taught class? 

Thanks for your question!  Team-taught classes are very rare at my university, but this model works pretty well from a crediting perspective.  Our usual teaching load is 3 courses per semester, but in most science departments, a lab class is credited as 1.5 courses. With this course, two faculty are "on" for the first half of the semester (the two modules + synthesis week basically take us to fall/spring break), and then the other two faculty are "on for the second half of the semester.  Each faculty member earns .5 teaching credit for that half-semester commitment, and it can potentially pair well with teaching a lab during the semester (or another .5 credit obligation).

 This is very interesting work and thank you for sharing it.  I'm curious if you might be Abel to shred's your numbers on how many of the students do decide to take another science course?  Is their a particular major that dominates the enrollment in your course?

This is an interesting project and I'm glad you are trying to continue it after the grant is concluded. Have your or will you assess the instructors' attitudes and perceptions of teaching general science education courses and/or teaching in the integrated modular configuration?

Very interesting project! Do you have any courses in which math is one of the modules? Seems like a great opportunity to promote better transfer/application of math skills in other areas of science. In fact, I am wondering if an approach like this could be used to foster mathematics transfer among science majors. Some of my colleagues at the University of Kansas have been wanting to do develop something like that.  

Thanks for your question! We've had a three modules from mathematics colleagues so far: One looked at mathematical models, including creating and testing the predictive accuracy of functions for financial decisions and phenomena such as the rate of disease or informations speed under threshold conditions; another introduced aspects of graph theory; another looked at patterns in nature and largely focused on golden ratio, logistic and exponential growth, and fractals. These were all offered in separate semesters, and the instructors paired their modules with colleagues from science disciplines to create a synthesis. For instance, for the module on patterns in nature, my module on complex systems was paired with the colleague, and we had synthesis activities that focused on models of population growth, including a Netlogo model (as I had been introducing students to complex systems via Netlogo models).