STEM Education: Concepts and Practice

Catalog description

This course is an introduction to concepts and practices that support effective STEM education. The course will emphasize concrete applications: specific pedagogical techniques, how they support a wide range of learning objectives, and why they are effective. Specific pedagogical techniques include: flipped classrooms, small-group workshops, think-pair-share methodologies, elicit/confront/resolve approaches, and project-based curricula. Students will learn how to connect specific pedagogical approaches with sophisticated course objectives that support diverse student populations to achieve conceptual, epistemological, communication, critical thinking, problem solving, and affective goals. Students will read foundational papers that describe concepts of how people learn to provide a theoretical understanding of why particular approaches are more effective. Students will also be introduced to “action research” methods by which STEM educators can assess effectiveness in their own classrooms.