Recap: Promoting Self-Efficacy through Inclusive Course Design

Two members of CETL's Inclusive Teaching Learning Community shared how they changed their STEM courses to enhance student success

This year’s STEM teaching lunch series has been a great success, with over one hundred faculty, staff, and students participating in lively conversations about teaching and learning in the STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) fields. With the Duff Center for Science and Technology Innovation opening soon, full of shiny new active learning classrooms to host STEM courses, there is a lot of interest among STEM educators at the university in exploring effective teaching practices.

Our sixth and final STEM teaching lunch was hosted on Monday, March 4th, featuring speakers Ayla Gafni, assistant professor of mathematics, and Ísis Arantes, instructional assistant professor of biology, both participants in CETL’s Inclusive Teaching Learning Community. They shared some of the changes they’ve made to their courses as a result of participating in the learning community, changes that have contributed to student learning and student success in those courses.

We’re more motivated to complete a puzzle if its complexity matches our skill level. That’s one way to think about the concept of self-efficacy. When students feel they have the skills needed to learn in a course (that is, they have a sense of self-efficacy), they’re more motivated to engage and succeed in that learning.

Ayla Gafni framed her thinking about inclusivity around thinking like a mathematician. With students in her linear algebra course coming from computer science and other non-mathematics majors, she looked for a way to teach study skills specific to the discipline of mathematics, echoing advice given by Sharday Ewell at the first STEM teaching lunch this spring. Ayla added a new category to her grading scheme called “success strategies” in which students could earn points for going about learning activities that they probably should be doing anyway, but might not know to do.

For example, students in Ayla’s course could earn points for attending class, spending time working online practice problems, completing a sample exam before an actual exam, and coming to office hours to ask questions. Other success strategies included completing weekly reflections on the course (which had the added benefit of giving Ayla insight into her students’ learning experiences), completing exam wrappers in which students reflected on how they studied for the exam and what kinds of mistakes they made on the exam, and keeping a handwritten notebook for their mathematics work. On that last option, Ayla noted how important it is to do math by hand!

There were 180 points available to students across all the success strategies, but students could only earn up to 60 points total. This meant that students could treat these strategies like a menu, picking and choosing the ones they wanted to practice. After one semester’s experiment with this new approach, Ayla reported that the number of Ds and Fs in the course decreased by about half over past offerings and that more students stuck with the course by actively engaging until the end of the semester. She saw the same number of As, but she figured that those students were already practicing these success strategies without her encouragement.

One of the lunch attendees asked a very good question during the discussion: Were any of the success strategies geared toward cooperative learning? Ayla noted that many students don’t like to think of mathematics as a group activity and that she didn’t when she was a student. Since she already had a lot of success strategies on her menu, she didn’t add one along these lines. I think it would be interesting to experiment with an addition of this sort, given the value of social and collaborative learning. I, too, was resistant to group work in my math courses as an undergraduate until I reached some very challenging upper-level courses, at which point my study sessions with peers became critical to my perseverance as a mathematics student.

Ísis Arantes typically teaches lab courses in the biology department, but in the summer will often teach a lecture course in genetics that’s aligned with a lab course. That’s the course she redesigned as a participant in the Inclusive Teaching Learning Community. She spoke eloquently at the session on March 4th about her intersectional experiences as a science student, navigating those experiences as a Brazilian woman from a lower-income family. Those experiences have motivated her to make her courses, lab and lecture alike, as accessible as she can to students of all backgrounds.

In her summer lecture course, Ísis instituted a number of changes recently. She built active and collaborative learning into every three-hour class period, sometimes around genetics problems that touch on students’ various identities and their understanding of identities. One example she shared was a case study about the South African runner and Olympic gold medal winner Caster Semenya who was assigned female at birth and competed as a woman but was found to have an intersex condition resulting in unusually high testosterone levels. The case study challenged Ísis’ students to think more deeply about the interplay between genetics and gender expression. (It should be noted that Semenya rejects the label “intersex,” instead calling herself “a different kind of woman.”)

Ísis also changed the grading scheme in her summer course to incorporate contract- and labor-based approaches, moving to a system in which letter grades were assigned based on the number of assignments students complete at a satisfactory level. For instance, to earn an A in the course, students needed to satisfactorily complete at least 14 in-class activities (with no more than 2 late or resubmitted activities), at least 10 lab activities (with no more than 1 late or resubmitted), and score at least an 85 average (out of 100) on the course exams. Benchmarks for other letters grades used the same categories, but with lower bars. Ísis also implemented two-stage exams, in which students complete an exam individually and then again in small groups. To calculate a student’s final grade on an exam, Ísis would take the difference between the group score and the average of the group members’ individual scores, divide that by two, and then add that to the individual scores.

These alternative grading practices were intended to turn course assessments into learning experiences for the students and to allow students to recover from early fumbles in the course. Many students need time to learn how to learn in a particular course (as Ayla Gafni noted in her remarks), and these structures provide incentives for students to keep moving toward mastery throughout the semester. And with the two-stage exams, what could be only an evaluation of learning turns into an opportunity to learn more deeply as students discuss exam questions in their small groups and learn from their peers’ approaches to the problems.

Thanks to Ayla and Ísis for sharing the changes they’ve made to their courses to promote student self-efficacy and success, and thanks to my CETL colleague Emily Donahoe for stepping in for me at the last minute to facilitate this great conversation! I was able to listen in to the conversation via Zoom, and I really enjoyed all the insightful remarks about teaching and learning.