Teaching and Learning STEM: A Practical Guide

by Richard M. Felder, Rebecca Brent, Barbara A. Oakley (Foreword)

Rethink traditional teaching methods to improve student learning and retention in STEM 

Educational research has repeatedly shown that compared to traditional teacher-centered instruction, certain learner-centered methods lead to improved learning outcomes, greater development of critical high-level skills, and increased retention in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines.

Teaching and Learning STEM presents a trove of practical research-based strategies for designing and teaching courses and assessing students' learning. The book draws on the authors' extensive backgrounds and decades of experience in STEM education and faculty development. Its engaging and well-illustrated descriptions will equip you to implement the strategies in your courses and to deal effectively with problems (including student resistance) that might occur in the implementation. The book will help you:

Plan and conduct class sessions in which students are actively engaged, no matter how large the class is Make good use of technology in face-to-face, online, and hybrid courses and flipped classrooms Assess how well students are acquiring the knowledge, skills, and conceptual understanding the course is designed to teach Help students develop expert problem-solving skills and skills in communication, creative thinking, critical thinking, high-performance teamwork, and self-directed learning Meet the learning needs of STEM students with a broad diversity of attributes and backgrounds

The strategies presented in Teaching and Learning STEM don't require revolutionary time-intensive changes in your teaching, but rather a gradual integration of traditional and new methods. The result will be continual improvement in your teaching and your students' learning.

Genres: Teaching, Science, Nonfiction, Education

313 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 14, 2016

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 5 out of 5]

Comprehensive, informative, and inspiring. This was the best review of a semester-long course in teaching STEM that I could've hoped for. I marked my copy up and will surely refer to it often in the coming years.

[Kadri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book very useful in both the teaching and learning aspects. From the teaching side of things it has a lot of ideas and methods on how to make STEM courses and classes more engaging and less conducive to falling asleep (but that's just from some of my personal experience).

From the learning side, it gives a lot of insight into what knowledge or skills are actually required and provided in a course and how to see whether what you're asked to do on a test is really what has been taught in the course.

Oh, and of course there are the important ideas about how to improve a class you're teaching - bringing doughnuts might help, as might not wearing the same clothes to class all the time :).

Just kidding, most of the tips in the book go to great depths beyond the fact that sometimes some learners might only be able to recall subject matter in a similar context as it when it was presented and how to deal with it.

And I think it's applicable way beyond just STEM.

More thoughts on it here

[☼Bookish in Virginia☼]

~review copy

So much has been written about STEM teaching and learning in the last decade or so that I was actually expecting this book to be about lower grades and not teaching at the college level. And not that high school teachers of all stripes can't learn from this book, it just surprised me to find that college professors had still not jumped on board.

The umbrella approach of this book is to emphasis Learning-Centered techniques, and to give you good reasons for why they work for more students that the old lecture, lecture, lecture techniques. To that end the authors discuss how brains learn. Then they walk your through writing everything from course objectives to individual class plans, and how to evaluate how students are doing. In addition they work to prepare you for your first class with this new approach: including problems and what to look-fors.

I found this book to be dense with lots to think about. Some of this information has appeared in papers by both the authors and other cognitive investigators. As a mom I have found concepts that I plan to share with my husband. In chapter 9, for example, the authors talk about how experts approach problems differently than novices. It's more than just experts 'just know'. Experts have a way of approaching and categorizing problems that they haven't seen before. And they stop periodically to analyze what they've done thus far. They ask themselves questions from start to finish. Is there a way of checking to see whether what I've done thus far is correct? Is there a way I could do this quicker? Unlike what my kids do, which is look at similar classroom problems; more advanced students reflect on the problem and classify it.

AND what I'm hoping using this approach will teach our kids --when they try to solve home computer problems, as well as school problems -- is show to give themselves reassurance (what the authors' call self-efficacy) so they can plunge ahead. Maybe even coming to the point where they gain information from the cases where they make mistakes.

SUMMARY
In the title of this review I suggested that people interesting in improving their teaching style to find a seminar by this team and to pick up the book as support literature. The authors own methodology would suggest that this might be the best way to really dig-in and learn these approaches well enough that you can implement them yourself.

I also suggest this approach because --at least in my experience-- it's easier to get through a book as content rich as this one if you have sat through a lively presentation and you can hear the authors' voices in your head as you read. Plus, despite claims to the opposite, this book is not a quick read. Every time you run across new information, or familiar information that is rephrased so it might make you see an possibility you missed before, you need to sit back and contemplate exactly how it applies to your situation. Or at least I have to.

~review copy

[Mike Bright · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book lives up to its title - it has lots of practical tips for teaching in science and engineering. I read several books earlier about the theory and psychology of teaching, and this text is a natural follow-on to put meat on the theoretical bones. Note this text has lots of references to relevant literature and is firmly based on research, but it is all about application.

I was pleased to see I am already using a number of these techniques in my classroom, but am challenged that I should be doing more. The text is well laid out to move through the various aspects of teaching a college course, but each chapter can easily stand on its own.

I often loan out my books so others can share in the bounty, but this one will stay on my shelf for regular reference. There is also too much to take on all at once, so I will be going back periodically to pick up one more technique I can try.

[Wiebke Kuhn · Rating 5 out of 5]

If yo are interested in teaching and learning, then you may not find that this book brings you that much new knowledge; however, it does, I believe, do a great job in clearly outlining how particularly higher education STEM faculty can make small and large changes to their classes to encourage deeper learning for all students, including the practice of professional skills (a.k.a soft skills) that too often are negleced on the track to Engineering and Medicine.
The specific examples, clear lists, rubrics and illustrations, and methodical organization of the text make this book a great read for anyone who wishes to think more about how they are teaching, from the novice to the experienced teacher, and from STEM fields to other sciences.

[Niklas Braun · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply an excellent resource for an educator. This is a required text for a class I'm taking on engineering education, but I blew through it in a week. It has so much good stuff in it and is very well written. I will keep this for reference.

[Khoi Nguyen · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of nice tips about teaching technical stuffs.

[Jason Bennett · Rating 5 out of 5]

I LOVE IT! Makes me feel so much more prepared to teach for the first time.