Transforming Undergraduate STEM Teaching Through Course Design, Faculty Support, and Data

College and university faculty can make meaningful changes to a STEM course by revising an assignment, using data more deliberately, or creating more opportunities for students to participate. But lasting improvement in undergraduate STEM teaching also depends on the systems around those courses, including departments, teaching centers, institutional policies, and the communities that help faculty keep improving their practices.

That is why a recent webinar on implementing the National Academies 2025 report Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education: Supporting Equitable and Effective Teaching focused on multiple levels of action. The panel, including members of the report’s authoring committee and a courseware designer, discussed course-level practices, faculty communities, and institutional structures that extend evidence-based teaching practices.

Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education frames equitable and effective undergraduate STEM teaching as a system-level responsibility shared by instructors, academic units, institutions, disciplinary organizations, funders, and students. It identifies seven principles for student-centered STEM learning and argues that colleges need course design, faculty support, data use, professional learning, teaching evaluation, and reward structures that align with those principles. The report emphasizes sustained improvement over quick change and connects classroom practice to broader institutional conditions.

Viewers of this webinar will notice that the seven principles anchoring Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education have much in common with the eight digitally enabled, evidence-based teaching practices (DE-EBTs) featured on Transform Learning. For example, both prioritize active learning, using students’ prior knowledge, data-informed instruction, fostering belonging, and instructional transparency.

This webinar showed how colleges, universities, teaching centers, faculty communities, and courseware designers are applying the National Academies report in practice. In addition to the classroom-level strategies highlighted below, the conversation addressed institutional communities of practice, emerging faculty alliances that support evidence-based teaching, evidence and measurement, student voice in course design, the growing influence of AI, and ways faculty and academic leaders can begin working with the report’s recommendations in their own contexts.

Make one course-level practice more transparent

Tracie Addy, Founding Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Rutgers University-New Brunswick, described the principles outlined in the report as a practical starting point for reviewing a course. Faculty can begin by looking at a syllabus, assignment, policy, or teaching routine and asking where students can benefit from moving closer to one of the report’s principles.

For example, to promote instructional transparency, Addy said, an instructor might review an assignment and clarify its purpose, the task students need to complete, and the criteria used in assessment. Doing this does not require a new assignment or a course redesign, and it makes the course objectives and structure more understandable to students and helps them see how the assignment supports their learning.

Daysha Jackson-Sanchez, Vice President of Impact and Strategic Initiatives at Lumen Learning, added that faculty often benefit from choosing one small change and then taking time afterward to reflect on what worked and what they can adjust next time. “There are so many different things that you could be doing, and it can be overwhelming,” she said. “So it’s a matter of, this week, let’s really home in on what it is that you might want to change in this moment.”

Create support for faculty to keep improving

The panelists emphasized that transformation depends on community structure. Addy described her participation in the Undergraduate STEM Implementation Community hosted by the Association for Undergraduate Education at Research Universities, where participants meet regularly to examine the report’s recommendations, compare institutional strengths and challenges, discuss data use, and bring implementation problems to peers for coaching. That structure helps faculty and academic leaders move from broad principles to specific institutional questions such as which courses create the clearest opportunity for improvement or what data instructors need to continuously improve the student experience.

Marco Molinaro, Executive Director for Educational Effectiveness and Analytics at the University of Maryland, College Park, described a related effort through the Alliance for Better College Teaching, which connects institutions and disciplinary groups to make supportive and effective teaching more visible. Its projects include evidence briefs, institutional self-reflection, measurement of teaching excellence, faculty development, and work on incentives.

For faculty, structures like these can make evidence-based teaching less isolated and more impactful by creating places to name common problems, test practical responses, and connect course-level changes to institutional support.

Adapt evidence-based teaching for large gateway courses

The panel also discussed how to build community in large-enrollment courses, where faculty may teach 100 or more students at a time. Addy pointed to interactive lecturing, active engagement, and classroom community as practical starting points. Faculty can build short moments for participation into lectures, use collaborative activities, and gather early information about who is in the class so students see themselves as part of a learning community rather than an anonymous audience.

Molinaro added that large course redesign may require faculty to create room for interaction by giving up some content: “That’s probably the hardest thing, especially in the STEM side, for faculty to acknowledge.”

He also pointed to grading as a course design choice that can change how students experience the class, especially when faculty reduce reliance on a few high-stakes exams and use assessment structures that recognize different forms of student contribution.

Jackson-Sanchez emphasized that in large courses faculty can create ways for students to contribute their own knowledge and experience, even when the class size makes connection harder.

Systemic transformation takes time

The webinar’s examples illustrate the larger argument in the National Academies report that effective and equitable teaching depends on the systems surrounding individual courses. While faculty can revise assignments for more transparency, for example, transformation of STEM education requires teaching centers to organize peer coaching, departments to examine data in large gateway courses, and institutions to create structures for recognizing and supporting teaching.

Those actions gain value when they connect to one another through sustained work. Archie Holmes, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at The University of Texas System and chair of the report’s committee, closed the discussion by putting that scale of work in practical terms. “We’re not going to be able to 90-minute-workshop our way out of this,” he said.

“This is not a one-and-done. It takes time. It takes effort. It takes commitment, reflection, all the things that you all have been talking about, to go on this journey.”