Building Student Success: Academic Literacy in STEM Lesson Study at the Tertiary Level
Abstract
This proposal outlines Year 1 of a 4-year STEM curricular reform project in a Hispanic-Serving Institution in Texas and collaborative lesson study planning from the perspectives of the College of Education, Engineering, and Science faculty team. The paper discusses aspects of academic literacy and proposes a framework for further changes.
Summary
In the current context of a globalized market and increasingly competitive economy, the U.S. aims to build strong and diverse STEM human resources. As part of this movement, the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA), a Hispanic-Serving Institution with a student body made up of more than 50% minority and often bilingual students, is committed to enhancing college-level students’ academic success in STEM through a curriculum reform project, thereby empowering underrepresented voices in the STEM future workforce. The project’s overarching goal is to develop new instructional methods and associated curricular changes with a strong focus on the intersection of academic literacy and core competencies.
This project draws upon a sociocultural conceptualization of academic literacy and lesson study practices to identify challenges that university faculty encounter as they teach students with diverse sociocultural backgrounds. To deepen and extend the understanding of students’ knowledge and learning experiences with regard to STEM literacy, we use an adapted lesson study cycle (Perry & Lewis, 2011; Tight, 2017; Wood & Cajkler, 2017), in which professional development groups are formed to identify critical issues and areas for development in college-level classrooms. Using existing (e.g., syllabi, course materials, student statistics, etc.) and collected evidence (e.g., lesson study cycles, student and faculty reflections of change), the lesson study groups, comprised of faculty and research assistants from the College of Education together with Engineering and Physics, collaboratively plan, teach, and observe a series of target lessons, using ongoing discussion and reflection. After two lesson study cycles, from November 2018 to April 2019, one of the major themes emerging from data analyses consists of identified individual and institutional affordances and constraints related to academic literacy practices in connection with disciplinary knowledge. The questions that frame our study include:
- How potential undergraduate student learning challenges, related to STEM literacy, are identified and addressed during the lesson study collaborations?
- In what ways do posited learning challenges inform and drive the instructional delivery of academic content?
Data are drawn from two lesson study groups, and two cycles of lesson study delivered in two sections of a gateway Engineering course (with 225 students) and one section of a gateway Physics course (with 100 students) at a large four-year Hispanic-serving university. Data analyses have been generated from the development and reflection of adapted lessons within each lesson study group, audio and video recordings of the meetings, and implemented target lessons, pre- and post-questionnaires of students, and interviews with students immediately following each lesson study cycle (n=40). These data are collected from lesson study courses (intervention courses) and comparison courses not undergoing lesson study practices (non-intervention courses).
Preliminary findings, drawn upon examples from lesson study conversations in pre- and post-implementation of each target lesson, reveal (1) the faculty’s meta-awareness of what constitutes effective instructional delivery and (2) the impact of the lesson study cycles on lesson planning, syllabus development, and student learning. For example, during the lesson study meetings, rigorous conversations repeatedly took place among the Engineering faculty with regard to how disciplinary language should be used and how specific timeframes should be appropriately allocated to promote effective pedagogy. The faculty, with a recognition of how academic language can vary within a specific context, can help students internalize new and increasingly complex STEM concepts, thereby developing their core competency in the target Engineering course. The discussions later led to changes in their instructional design, namely, the ways in which the materials were delivered, how academic literacy was addressed explicitly, and a handout for students that focuses on academic literacy development to make connections among STEM literacy, problem-solving, and scientific concepts.
Furthermore, in the STEM setting, academic literacy involves not only written and oral texts, but also the complex multimodal representation of graphs, charts, formulas, and diagrams, as well as the language used to address these conceptual tools. For instance, the Physics faculty identified students’ ability to connect visual representations with written academic language as one main challenge that has presumably been hindering their students’ understanding of content. This challenge, then, became the starting point for the redesign of the target lesson plan, e.g., in which students were shown step-by-step instructions on how to write equations out of a given diagram. Extensive research has also been conducted on conceptualizing academic literacy, typically defined as the language practices of schooling, both in oral and written forms, that are required to develop and display proficiency or expertise in a particular discipline (Gee, 2012; Langman & Hansen-Thomas, 2017; Schleppegrell, 2004).
STEM-related literacy tasks and functions, therefore, play a critical role in STEM practices that are modeled and contextually utilized by both instructors and students in the conceptualization and application of disciplinary content (Lee, Quinn, and Valdés, 2013; Téllez, Moschkovich, and Civil, 2011). As also found in follow-up interviews and video content analyses, students showed their engagement and positive attitudes towards increased interaction in class time, instructors’ modeling of problem-solving, extensive practice in different conditions, experiential learning through demonstrations and exemplifications, as well as explicit connections between theory and practice in the context of real-world situations and their career disciplines. Increasingly incorporating these academic literacy functions into the faculty’s lesson planning, interventions, reflection sessions, and non-conventional approaches to STEM teaching and learning, in turn, could enhance the process of concept-learning, problem-solving, and self-empowering. These changes, however, are not implemented in a vacuum. This project also outlines the challenges and research implications that the use of the lesson study approach entails to accomplish the desired impact in student learning of STEM literacy. Some of these challenges include a lack of time availability for lesson planning and discussion in light of the faculty participants’ schedules, their continuity in the project, as well as difficulty in incorporating the required depth of expertise across disciplinary areas (i.e., STEM and Education) during the research process.
All things regarded, the initial findings suggest that the transition from basic or introductory courses to more advanced courses at the university level in the STEM fields can be viewed, in part, in terms of shifts in traditional pedagogical approaches and academic literacy expectations. Small-scale instructional advances, such as the faculty involvement in lesson study cycles and their recognition of literacy’s roles in learning, are likely to become the first promising step for transforming syllabus design and, eventually, curriculum, which aligns with the project’s overall goal of restructuring early STEM courses and centering minoritized voices in the STEM workforce. Finally, to make feasible the broadest impact on college student learning, we outline a strategic framework for sustainable academic literacy instruction that includes explicit attention to (1) the connection between students’ diverse background knowledge and with faculty’s expected knowledge (Perin, 2011), and then with real-life applications in future career contexts; (2) the connection between academic literacy and language through which the conceptual content is expressed; (3) the intersection and collaboration of cross-disciplinary expertise among the involved faculty; and (4) the development of professional identities among university students as a lens through which to imagine a future STEM career. This framework, in turn, proposes a systemic curricular change, beginning with faculty development on an academic literacy-infused approach to STEM teaching and learning.
