Leaders of Change?: Academic Associations and Undergraduate Education

Abstract

T he U.S. higher education system has wrestled for years with low success and completion rates in STEM fields, particularly among historically marginalized and underrepresented groups of students. Innovative instructional methods in STEM have the potential to improve outcomes and reduce disparities, as practices designed to elicit active learning yield better results than traditional lecture-based approaches—especially for students from underserved backgrounds (Freeman et al., 2014). Yet recent studies suggest that the majority of undergraduate STEM courses are still taught using predominantly traditional approaches