Background
Local and national initiatives to improve the learning experiences of students enrolled in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses have been on-going for a couple of decades with a heightened momentum within the last 10 years. However, recent large-scale studies have demonstrated that transmission of information is still the primary mode of instruction in STEM courses across the undergraduate curriculum. The limited impact of instructional change reform efforts can be partly explained by the one-sided focus of educational research on the development of evidence-based instructional practices and production of evidence demonstrating their impact on student learning. This has been done at the expense of understanding faculty members’ instructional practices and mindsets about teaching and learning that underlie their practices. This study addresses this gap in the literature by characterizing STEM instructors’ instructional intentions and reflections on their teaching performance for a week of instruction. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews with 42 STEM faculty members from one doctorate-granting institution in the USA.

Results
STEM instructors in this study had teacher-centric mindsets with respect to their instructional planning (e.g., content-focused learning goals, lecture is seen as an engagement strategy). We found that these instructors mostly saw formative assessment tools as engagement strategy rather than tools to monitor student learning. Reflections on their level of satisfaction with their week of teaching focused heavily on content coverage and personal feelings and minimally considered student learning. Finally, we found that pedagogical discontent was not a driver of planned course revisions.

Conclusions
This study identifies mismatches between STEM instructors’ teaching mindsets and current approaches to instructional change. STEM instructors in this study paid minimal attention to student learning when considering course-level revisions and many of their reflections were anchored in their personal feelings. However, instructional reform strategies often attempt to convince faculty of a new approach by demonstrating its impact on student learning. The misalignment identified in this study further highlights the need to better characterize STEM instructors’ cognition around teaching so that reform efforts can better meet them where they are.



中文翻译：

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探索STEM专上教师的教学计划和修订说明

背景
在过去的十年中，地方和国家为改善参加科学，技术，工程和数学（STEM）课程的学生的学习体验而开展的举措已经持续了几十年。但是，最近的大规模研究表明，信息传输仍然是整个本科课程中STEM课程的主要教学方式。教学改革改革努力的有限影响可以部分地通过教育研究对基于证据的教学实践的发展和产生证明其对学生学习的影响的证据的一侧重点来解释。这样做的代价是要了解教师的教学实践和有关其实践基础的教学观念。这项研究通过表征STEM老师的教学意图和对他们一周教学的教学表现的思考来弥补文献中的空白。通过与来自美国一所博士学位授予机构的42名STEM教员进行半结构化访谈，收集了数据。

结果
本研究中的STEM讲师在教学计划方面具有以教师为中心的心态（例如，以内容为中心的学习目标，将演讲视为一种参与策略）。我们发现这些教师大多将形成性评估工具视为参与策略，而不是监控学生学习的工具。关于他们对一周教学的满意程度的思考主要集中在内容的覆盖范围和个人感受以及对学生学习的考虑最少的方面。最后，我们发现教学上的不满并不是计划课程修订的驱动力。

结论
这项研究确定了STEM讲师的教学思想与当前教学改革方法之间的不匹配。这项研究中的STEM讲师在考虑课程级别的修订时很少关注学生的学习，他们的许多反思都植根于他们的个人感受中。但是，教学改革策略通常试图通过证明其对学生学习的影响来使教师信服新方法。本研究中发现的失调进一步凸显了需要更好地表征STEM讲师对教学的认知，以便改革工作可以更好地满足他们所在的位置。