experiences for students. However, many longstanding policies and practices in undergraduate STEM education have produced, perpetuated, and exacerbated differences in opportunities, experiences, and outcomes among post-secondary STEM students. For example, widespread use of teaching strategies that are not supported by research have contributed to the disparities in opportunity and outcomes for undergraduate STEM students. Students from lower socio-economic backgrounds, students of color, first-generation college goers, women, and students with disabilities have consistently fared worse in post-secondary STEM education. Students from these groups make up much of the current and future undergraduate population. Educating them so that they can contribute to societal efforts to meet the demands of the 21st century requires re-evaluating instructional practices in STEM and improving the learning experiences of undergraduate students in STEM courses and programs.

With this in mind, the Board on Science Education of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine convened the Committee on Equitable and Effective Teaching in Undergraduate STEM Education: A Framework for Institutions, Educators, and Disciplines to examine research on learning, teaching, and institutional change in order to provide guidance for undergraduate STEM educators and institutions on improving undergraduate instruction and addressing existing disparities in STEM education. This committee brought together individuals from many different kinds of higher education institutions, who represent expertise across the STEM disciplines.

The resulting report is designed to provide a common language and structure for conversations across academia. By anchoring those conversations in a clear understanding of what is known about teaching, learning, and equity, institutions and individuals across disciplines will better understand their important role in changing the system. The report’s seven Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching, conclusions, recommendations, and research agenda together provide a structure by which stakeholders across post-secondary education can converse and plan in order to work toward a system where all students at all institutions of higher education can experience student-centered, equitable, and effective STEM learning experiences. This complex conversation and the resulting actions will require the cooperation and collaboration of all stakeholders, including instructors, leaders of academic units (e.g., departments, programs), institutional leaders, researchers, governing boards, professional societies, funders of STEM education, and students themselves to achieve equitable and effective teaching and learning for all.

of excellence. The focus is on helping all students learn and understand STEM concepts and be able to use them in practical ways.

A course that is designed around equitable and effective teaching strategies will make the course goals clear to the students, recognize the students’ role in their own learning, and give students agency to engage in the course material in ways that welcome and respect their identities. This approach makes student learning the primary driver (e.g., the course is student centered). In contrast, an instructor-centered course usually focuses on covering a certain amount of content, with the volume of content serving as the primary driver of the schedule, course policies, instructional methods, and assessments. Common grading practices generally result in a single letter grade on a transcript for each course. Given the widely varying approaches to assigning these letters they do not fully convey the complexity and extent of student learning and are often assigned in ways that are not equitable. A focus on student learning goals can be one component of addressing these inequities.

Some barriers to students’ success emerge from their experiences in individual classrooms or courses, while others arise from the structure of course offerings and requirements for their program, major, or institution. Students are often expected to take a sequence of STEM courses that may not be well coordinated. Focused attention on examining and improving the coherence of learning goals across course sequences, programs, and majors can help educators design pathways that make sense for their students, thereby enabling improvements in individual courses, facilitating alignment to the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching, increasing transparency, and improving student outcomes. These changes can therefore help students navigate opportunities for learning STEM and obtaining credentials.

VALUING AND SUPPORTING INSTRUCTORS

Designing, implementing, and improving STEM learning experiences to make them more equitable and effective requires use of a diverse set of instructional practices, attention to the social dynamics in and culture of the classroom, and regular cycles of reflection and innovation by individual or groups of instructors. Making STEM instruction equitable and effective requires academic units and institutions to (a) demonstrate that they value and will reward teaching and (b) provide support and guidance to help instructors achieve high-quality learning experiences in STEM for all students.

Implementation of equitable and effective teaching is a process of continuous improvement that necessitates all instructors engage in reflection about their teaching and work to make it better. Professional learning and

development (PLD) is one key tool that instructors can use throughout their careers to learn approaches and engage with colleagues in communities that foster that continuous improvement. This includes everyone who engages with undergraduates in their courses and classrooms: full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty, part-time and contingent faculty, graduate student teaching assistants, postdoctoral fellows, and others. Another important aspect of PLD is its role in the use of digital technologies in the classroom, which have the potential to afford opportunities to enhance equitable and effective teaching in STEM when they are introduced along with PLD opportunities that provide guidance and support for instructors. The PLD can occur on campus or virtually and be conducted in both formal and informal ways.

Institutional support is needed to ensure that ongoing high-quality PLD is available and accessible for all types of instructors. At many institutions, tenure-track faculty are encouraged to prioritize research over teaching and discouraged from spending time on the courses they teach. Some non-tenure-track educators focus more on teaching but may be excluded from professional development opportunities and communities, and sometimes even from faculty or academic unit meetings and functions. The reasons instructors do not engage in PLD vary but include historical precedent, incentives to prioritize other responsibilities, a lack of rewards for attention to teaching, and limitations in funding for time spent on PLD. Exclusion has long-term effects: graduate students and postdoctoral scholars need professional learning and development to prepare for potential roles as future faculty in addition to professional learning and development related to any existing roles as instructors or teaching assistants. Overall, when institutions and academic units do not value teaching and preparing for it via PLD they deprive instructors of appropriate venues for connecting with other instructors to form communities that can advance continuous improvement.

MEASURING AND ADVANCING SYSTEM CHANGE

Using these Principles to improve undergraduate teaching and learning in STEM will require a commitment from, and collaboration of, stakeholders ranging from individual instructors to leaders of STEM academic units and higher education institutions. Academic units hold collective responsibility for ensuring that educators working under their auspices have the resources and supports they need to provide equitable and effective undergraduate STEM learning experiences. Academic units also have responsibility for ensuring that all learning experiences they oversee, including courses, laboratories, field experiences, research experiences, and prerequisite and other requirements for programs and majors, provide equitable and effective STEM learning experiences for students. Academic units play a major

role in decisions and policies about teaching assignments, career advancement, rewards, promotion, and tenure, including how teaching is valued, recognized, evaluated, and rewarded, and how teaching assignments are made. Academic unit decisions and policies related to teaching, grading, and other aspects of the culture of the unit can impede or promote the implementation of equitable and effective teaching strategies. For example, in some academic units, instructors teaching courses that are foundational, have large enrollments, or that are designed for non-major learners are not treated with the same respect as those who teach upper-level courses focused on students majoring in the discipline. This culture can be changed; instruction and student learning can become central values.

Policies and procedures at the institutional level can demonstrate instruction is valued and can either impede or promote implementation of the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching. Change toward equitable and effective teaching will require coordinated effort from multiple levels of institutional leadership and a culture of growth that is responsive to the needs of students and instructors. Data, both aggregated and disaggregated, are essential to accurately understanding, enacting, and monitoring change. Both quantitative and qualitative data are needed to fully understand what is happening in a system and to provide information to guide change efforts. Reflective analysis of data best guides policy and practice decisions and informs ongoing efforts at improvement. Institutional leaders can analyze and reform policies and practices so that incentives for faculty, instructors, and academic unit leaders are aligned with the goal of equitable and effective teaching and all stakeholders are supported in change efforts. Institutional change at the deepest levels is an ongoing process. Setting up processes for continuous improvement can have a larger long-term impact than seeking quick, dramatic change. Processes for sustained systemic change can include (a) opportunities for institutional stakeholders at all levels to become familiar with the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching and why they are important; (b) attention to an academic unit’s culture and the challenges of implementing change; (c) both top-down and bottom-up changes with attention to power dynamics in the institution and who holds positional power as well as who holds more informal power and influence; and (d) vigilant and transparent communication among key stakeholders.

RECOMMENDATIONS FOR ACTION

The committee envisions a system in which all undergraduate STEM students have equitable and effective learning experiences, feel welcomed, and have the opportunity to succeed in their STEM courses and programs, regardless of their identity or background. Key to achieving this vision is that all instructors have the knowledge, skills, and motivation to create

welcoming, student-centered STEM courses that are built on what is known about how students learn and about the environments in which all students can succeed. Structural changes and collective responsibility within and across institutions are also critical for this vision to be implemented, sustained, and successful. The committee therefore offers recommendations for action that span the range of levels and actors in higher education. Making student-centered learning a central and explicit goal of course design is a necessary, but not sufficient, component of achieving equitable and effective learning experiences. The challenge of defining equitable and effective teaching is also partly a journey in helping the higher education community to redefine what teaching looks like, and in so doing identify the equity-based behaviors missing from our current notion of effective teaching. This challenge involves change at the classroom level in the approaches to teaching and also in the wider system to provide incentives, supports, and structures that influence teaching decisions.

Toward Equitable and Effective Learning Environments

Recommendation 1: Instructors, working independently and collaboratively, should use the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching to reflect on and revise their instructional practices, approaches to assessment, course syllabi and grading policies, and the selection and use of instructional resources. They should articulate clear learning goals for courses and use these learning goals to design instruction and assessment for courses in all modalities and settings, including online, in the classroom, in the laboratory, and in the field and continually reflect on and improve instructional practices over time based on student learning data.

Recommendation 2: Members of academic units collectively should take responsibility for reviewing the portfolio of courses offered and the sequencing of courses using the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching. They should work collectively to define clear course and program learning outcomes and use them to refine and revise the content and pedagogy of course sequences and individual courses. As part of the review, academic units should use both aggregated and disaggregated data of multiple forms to identify courses or course sequences that appear to be producing systematic, inequitable outcomes and undertake revisions to address them.

Recommendation 3: Developers of instructional materials and resources at institutions of higher education, nonprofits, and companies should work collaboratively with experts in teaching and learning (and

experienced instructors) to develop resources and materials, including educational and instructional technology, using the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching as a guide for informing design from the initial stages of conceptualization. If developers attempt to use the Principles to modify a product in a later stage of development it is less likely that the resulting product will be equitable and effective. Developers should also work collaboratively with experts in teaching and learning (and experienced instructors) to create the professional learning, support, and guidance that instructors will need to equitably and effectively use their products.

Valuing and Supporting Instructors

Recommendation 4: Academic unit and institutional leaders should support participation of all instructors in professional learning and development grounded in the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching by providing resources, encouragement, and financial compensation. Specifically, they should foster a culture of improvement and change policies to provide incentives and compensation for instructors to engage in professional learning and development as part of their workload so that all instructors receive a base level of preparation before they begin teaching and are provided with, compensated for, and encouraged to participate in ongoing opportunities to continue improving their teaching. Implementation will involve coordinating with academic units to also compensate instructor time (such as course release, salary increase, or funding bonus) for developing or revising courses to align with equitable and effective teaching practices, potentially including changing lesson goals, changing instructional practices, and/or changing instructional tools.

Recommendation 5: Academic unit and institutional leaders should foster a support structure for instructors (e.g., centers for teaching and learning, STEM education centers) that can (a) organize and offer accessible professional learning opportunities (including on campus, virtual, and asynchronous) that are grounded in the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching, and (b) support academic unit-level professional learning and development opportunities.

Recommendation 6: Graduate and postdoctoral program leaders should revise programs and expectations to make preparation for teaching an integral learning goal of programs. They should work to change cultures so that all participants are encouraged and supported in meaningful professional learning and development activities focused

on teaching, learning, course design, and creating an equitable learning environment that embraces and promotes equitable and effective teaching. When teaching, graduate students and postdoctoral scholars should be supported by a mentor who has expertise in the use of the Principles to support equitable and effective teaching.

Recommendation 7: Academic unit leaders should develop policies and practices that value, recognize, and reward equitable and effective teaching. Steps they can take include

• Providing time in unit meetings to discuss teaching-related topics such as reviewing students’ outcomes in courses, discussing the unit’s strategy for continuous improvement of teaching, and sharing information about successes and challenges in teaching.
• Supporting individual and groups of instructors as they improve and revise their courses including providing dedicated time to work on course revision or additional financial compensation.
• Encouraging and providing time and resources for collaboration among instructors to work on course and curriculum revision and redesign.
• Designing policies and practices for making teaching assignments that value the teaching of all courses and the contributions of all instructors regardless of their appointment type.
• Identifying and supporting cohorts of instructors who are dedicated to and interested in implementing equitable and effective teaching and providing them with leadership opportunities.
• Facilitating the access and use of relevant data that can help instructors identify and monitor differences and changes in student outcomes.

Recommendation 8: Academic unit leaders should revise practices around hiring and onboarding of new instructors so that teaching is an essential and valued component of the role. In hiring, job candidates should be evaluated by their ability to engage in equitable and effective teaching. Once hired, instructors should receive mentoring related to equitable and effective teaching and be provided with opportunities to engage in ongoing professional learning and development.

Recommendation 9: Academic unit leaders should use the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching as professional standards that form the basis of teaching evaluation processes. To achieve this goal, they should use evidence-based approaches to evaluate the entire portfolio of teaching-related activities. This evaluation should go beyond student surveys to include other forms of evidence (e.g., structured teaching

observations, analysis of teaching artifacts, course design, instructor reflections) and serve as a formative and holistic evaluation of teaching.

Recommendation 10: Academic unit and institutional leaders should include and value teaching during review processes for advancement and retention such that all instructors are expected and required to provide equitable and effective teaching.

• Determine reappointment, raises, merit, promotion, and tenure in a clear and transparent way that rewards instructor work toward achieving equitable and effective teaching.
• Develop approaches for determining promotion and tenure that include holistic evidence-based evaluation of the faculty member’s teaching.
• Develop processes for changes to salaries and titles that consider all different categories of employees who have teaching responsibilities, including visiting faculty, instructors, teaching assistants, adjunct faculty, and lecturers (VITAL instructors).

Measuring and Advancing System Change

Recommendation 11: Institutional leaders should develop and support the infrastructure and approaches needed to collect, use, and monitor data about courses and programs, as well as student outcomes, experiences, belonging, and other affective measures. They should provide access to the system and to the data in a transparent way so that instructors and academic units can use it to improve teaching and learning. This will entail offering guidance to academic units about which metrics to review on a regular basis and multi-level strategies to investigate and decrease any gaps discovered. The systems should include qualitative and quantitative data from both internal and external (from studies or federal agencies) sources and allow for disaggregation of data by students’ demographic characteristics so that revised policies and practices can be implemented to decrease disparities.

Recommendation 12: Members of academic units should take into account the complexity of the student undergraduate population and their varied goals and pathways to ensure that all students can equitably and effectively experience and benefit from the unit’s courses, programs, and credentials. They should examine data for obstacles and barriers to undergraduate STEM learning and apply the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching to smooth the educational journeys of their students. Academic units should analyze transition points, course offerings,

student experiences, and student outcomes and use the information to remediate obstacles that limit student learning or student progress toward a credential, especially obstacles that disproportionately impact students who are members of underserved groups.

Recommendation 13: Professional, academic, and disciplinary societies and organizations should publicly endorse and elevate the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching and adopt them to guide their work related to undergraduate education. Specifically, they should

• Share clear position statements on and advocate for the importance of equitable and effective teaching with their members, constituents, and the public.
• Coordinate with teaching experts in their discipline to design, offer, or coordinate professional learning and development opportunities to support instructors in their discipline to implement equitable and effective teaching practices.
• Coordinate with teaching experts to develop, curate, and promote resources for addressing discipline-specific teaching needs.
• Offer events that showcase and disseminate practices, tools, data, and research related to implementing equitable and effective teaching.
• Cultivate professional learning and development communities for current and future instructors and encourage academic units to do the same.
• Include experts in equitable and effective teaching in society leadership.
• Review the guidelines for any accreditations that they administer and support academic units to implement these guidelines in ways that maximize equitable and effective teaching and learning.
• Promote comparative studies that help identify approaches that lead to more equitable outcomes, especially for foundational courses.

Recommendation 14: Oversight bodies should endorse and adopt the Principles for Equitable and Effective Teaching to guide their work. Through their oversight, they should require institutional leaders to demonstrate that work at their institution is being done in alignment with the Principles and that policies and procedures have been updated accordingly.