Evidenced Based Teaching in STEM and activating prior knowledge

Reading time: Approximately 5 minutes

The Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL) offers a Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) designed to provide STEM educators with evidence-based strategies they can employ to improve their teaching as well as effectively conduct teaching as research projects. The course, An Introduction to Evidence-Based Undergraduate STEM Teaching, is offered every few weeks at: https://www.edx.org/course/an-introduction-to-evidence-based-undergraduate-stem-teaching-6

This course aims to "provide future STEM faculty, graduate students and post-doctoral fellows with an introduction to effective teaching strategies and the research that supports them. The goal of the eight-week course is to equip the next generation of STEM faculty to be effective teachers, thus improving the learning experience for the thousands of students they will teach".

If you don't want to enroll in the course, you can review all course modules and resources for free at https://www.stemteachingcourse.org/home.

The modules contain several brief microlectures that focus on key pedagogical concepts and assessment strategies contextualized for various STEM disciplines. For example, this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecDmvafcDDY&t=7s (found in Module 2 - approximately 10 minutes), focuses on how to activate prior knowledge in students. The instructor uses a famous example from the field of psychology, to illustrate how students in a statistics class have a higher chance of understanding hypothesis testing when you use real world examples students may be familiar with, as opposed to discipline specific symbols and abstract language to solve problems.

This is not to say you should avoid using the language of the discipline. The point of activating prior knowledge is to help students make connections from what you are teaching, to what they already know, so that they have a better chance of understanding and retaining what you want them to know. This also helps increase the chance that students will be able to transfer what they learn to related contexts.