SEISMIC
Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses
Foundational STEM courses introduce disciplines and act as gateways to majors. At large research universities, these courses are taught to hundreds or even thousands of students a term. They strongly influence career choice and present persistent challenges to diversifying STEM fields. They are often taught in industrial ways, with little recognition of or response to the diversity of students. As a result, outcomes disappoint everyone involved.
Students – especially those who do not fit the model of those already successful in STEM – struggle to achieve their goals or receive the support they need. Faculty members know their students learn much less than they’d like and are rarely inspired. Campus leaders are attracted by the financial benefits of education at scale, but worry that these courses present outsize barriers to student progress. Everyone working to make STEM disciplines more equitable and inclusive is acutely aware that these remote, impersonal foundational courses present a persistent problem.
We address this problem in a new way with a sustained multi-institutional, multi-disciplinary STEM education research and development collaboration. This collaboration is motivated by a clear-eyed, openly stated focus on equity and inclusion in large foundational courses as the central goal of the reform process, harnessing a higher level of collective passion from the students, faculty, staff, and administrators who participate. We believe we can achieve more together than we can alone. We will help to define a new standard for STEM reform projects: a class cannot be successful unless it is equitable and inclusive.
To recognize this focus, we call the project SEISMIC, for “Sloan Equity and Inclusion in STEM Introductory Courses.” SEISMIC takes advantage of efforts already underway on many university campuses, drawing together a close, multifaceted collaboration of STEM reform communities from 10 large public research universities. Participants connect through parallel data analyses and data sharing, coordinated experiments, continuous exchange of speakers and graduate student researchers, and extended annual meetings. Parallel analyses and data sharing focus on studies of equity and inclusion and STEM persistence across all institutions. Coordinated experimentation is explored across multiple campuses and in multiple disciplines. Our continuous exchange of speakers and annual meetings accelerate research, build community, enhance the spread of ideas, and reinforce our focus on equity and inclusion as a central metric for STEM reform success.
We have included our original proposal to the Sloan Foundation from 2018 below for more information on the intent of SEISMIC. Of course, SEISMIC has changed in some ways since the proposal was written. We have also become more sophisticated in our work to promote equity and inclusion. We are including this original version to be more open about our collaboration and show where it started from. This was SEISMIC Director Tim McKay’s original conception for the collaboration. Please also note that the proposal format may be different than expected. Proposals to the Sloan Foundation are structured differently than ones for NSF.
We have also included our formal metrics below, developed in collaboration with the Sloan Foundation in 2020 after receiving additional funding.