49. Closing the performance gap

Sometimes, as faculty, we are quick to assume that performance gaps in our courses are due to the level of preparedness of students rather than what we do or do not do in our departments. In this episode, Dr. Angela Bauer, the chair of the Biology Department at High Point University, joins us to discuss how community building activities and growth mindset messaging combined with active learning strategies can help close the gap.

Show Notes

  • “Success for all Students: TOSS workshops” – Inside UW-Green Bay News (This includes a short video clip in which Dr. Bauer describes TOSS workshops)
  • Dweck, C. S. (2008). Mindset: The new psychology of success. Random House Digital, Inc.
  • Barkley, E. F., Cross, K. P., & Major, C. H. (2014). Collaborative learning techniques: A handbook for college faculty. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Life Sciences Education
  • Steele, C. M., & Aronson, J. (1995). Stereotype threat and the intellectual test performance of African Americans. Journal of personality and social psychology, 69(5), 797.
  • Steele, C. M. (1997). A threat in the air: How stereotypes shape intellectual identity and performance. American psychologist, 52(6), 613.
  • The Teaching Lab Podcast – Angela Bauer’s new podcast series. (Coming soon to iTunes and other podcast services)

Transcript

Rebecca: Sometimes, as faculty, we are quick to assume that performance gaps in our courses are due to the level of preparedness of students rather than what we do or do not do in our departments. In this episode, we’ll discuss how community building activities and growth mindset messaging combined with active learning strategies can help close the gap.

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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer.

Rebecca: Together we run the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego.

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John: Our guest today is Dr. Angela Bower, the chair of the biology department at High Point University. Welcome Angela!

Angela: Thank you John! Hello Rebecca

Rebecca: Hi, welcome!

Angela: Thank you

Rebecca: Today’s teas are…

Angela: I have a piping hot mug of Earl Grey

Rebecca: Yes! Someone drinks tea again! [LAUGHTER]

John: I have ginger peach green tea.

Rebecca: And John get ready for this, Dragon Oolong tea

John: That’s actually very good.

Rebecca: We have a joke that I have my standbys and this was not one of them.

John: We’ve invited you here to talk about your work on reducing the performance gap for underrepresented students in STEM disciplines. Before we discuss this could you tell us a little about the performance gap?

Angela: You bet! Well, I can tell you about my experiences at two different institutions, although I can say that my experiences at these two institutions with respect to the performance gap in foundation STEM courses is not unique to these institutions. It’s a natural phenomenon that if we look at foundation courses that are taught with a traditional lecture format typically, which still is often the case with STEM courses. We see a gap in the performance between majority students and then students from underrepresented groups and this was the case when I taught biology courses at the University of Wisconsin in Green Bay. If we went back and looked at the data in a foundation course in Introduction to Human biology course that we had taught for decades, we could see prior to a change in pedagogy in terms of what was happening in that course, we could see for decades prior a gap in the performance between majority and underrepresented students at that institution. Likewise the same is true at High Point University with the way that we used to teach our introductory biology courses. And this performance gap is really troubling because often times what it means is that the students in those courses that are not performing well, we tend to lose them and in the end we end up having a much lower percentage of students who are members of underrepresented groups choosing to major in the sciences and then of course choosing to pursue professions related to the sciences as well.

Rebecca: Where does this performance gap originate?

Angela: Well that’s a really interesting question and there are a lot of misconceptions about where that performance gap originates. I’ll go back to when I first started teaching. What I assumed which was entirely wrong was that the academic performance gap was an indication of a difference in the academic preparedness of students from underrepresented groups. So I like many other faculty in my field assumed that students were coming to our institutions not having a high school education that prepared them to perform well in these introductory science and math courses. I later came to find out that this was not at all the case. We did a study at University of Wisconsin in Green Bay where we controlled for let’s say SAT scores of these students coming in; so if we looked at maybe white students and black students who came in within the same range of SAT scores specifically their math scores which is a strong indicator of how well they will perform in the course and if we looked at how they performed in the course even when we controlled for SAT Math score, we saw a performance gap. So that suggested to us (and this was the big lightbulb moment for me) this doesn’t have anything to do really with academic preparedness at least with respect to our student population. What it has to do is something that we’re doing in the classroom. We really were teaching in a way that favored the academic performance of students of a particular group or did not enhance the academic performance of our underrepresented minority students and so that’s when we decided to make some changes.

Rebecca: How did you start to figure out what to pinpoint?

Angela: Well interesting how we stumbled upon an approach that worked at Green Bay. We had a variety of instructors teaching this introductory course, so we had multiple sections going on at a given time and as you know is often the case to change what’s happening in the classroom to get instructors to adhere to a different pedagogy; who are often swamped and busy and maybe have taught the course for a certain way for a number of years and are not comfortable with moving to for example a more student-centered format with respect to their courses (which by the way is pretty daunting when you have lecture sections of 150 students). So what we initially decided to do just to see if it would have any impact was we started to do things outside of the classrooms in a way that was very student-led and student centered. Students who were enrolled in this introduction to human biology course in Green Bay were provided with the opportunity to attend workshops outside of the classroom that were totally optional and we call them toss workshops TOSS, which was an acronym that stood for targeted opportunities for success in science. And we chose students to serve as mentors for these TOSS workshops who were science majors who had at least received grades of B or better in these introductory courses, but who had really strong social skills. Then I worked with those student mentors to train them in student-centered pedagogies and also a culturally inclusive classroom approaches and then they would offer these tops workshops at a variety of times during the week when we were sure that we would get a number of students who could attend. In other words we tried to make sure that those TOSS workshop opportunities didn’t interfere with their academic schedule and these weren’t required and we went about recruiting students for these workshops in a really interesting way. We conducted this in collaboration with a man named Dr. Sean Robinson who is now on the Whitewater campus in Wisconsin, but he at the time was working within our Multicultural Center and he worked really hard to recruit underrepresented students who were his advisees in the Multicultural Center and spread the word. Likewise he helped us recruit a fabulous mentor for our students Mr. Junie Lee who was a grad of our program at Wisconsin, who was also very good at networking with these students and we made it very widely known and it became a popular fun thing to do. Because the students who led the toss workshops were very socially engaging they planned fun activities to review the week’s content and it certainly became a destination for these students and it created a really strong sense of community. And over the four years that we ran this TOSS programming what we found from the very first semester that we offered these opportunities outside of the classroom was that we closed the gap and that happened every single semester for eight semesters across those four years. Multiple sections even with different instructors in different pedagogies in these courses having that opportunity to participate in TOSS workshops totally changed the culture and we closed the gap. And so what we learned from that was that a sense of community was I think probably key here. We know this because (well we assumed this) of an interesting analysis that Dr. W Furlong did, who had worked with our office of institutional research in Green Bay. We looked at the student mentors that led the TOSS workshops and we looked at the activities that they had planned for their TOSS workshops in a given semester and I also ranked the students then in terms of the level of difficulty of the exercises that they performed. In other words how academically rigorous were those workshops versus how much social stuff is going on and we actually found an inverse correlation with the academic rigor in the workshops and the impact of the workshops themselves. So in other words when those mentors were just more social and creating a strong sense of community and spending more time just engaging students generally not necessarily reviewing academic content, that’s when we saw the most profound effect. So this is what led us then to really now focus our efforts with respect to closing the performance gap on really the more emotional components of learning, the affective domain of learning. And yeah of course I’m not at all saying the cognitive part isn’t incredibly important because absolutely it is, it would be silly to say that it wasn’t but generally what we found in Wisconsin and now also what we’re finding at High Point University is that we can close that gap by paying really close attention to that effective emotional component of learning and taking really intentional steps to just create a very inclusive community for students and to engage them in very intentional ways.

John: Have there been changes in classrooms as well to try to build the same type of inclusive environment within the classroom setting?

Angela: Yes. So once faculty learned that the impact of TOSS workshops in Green Bay, more and more of them started to pay more attention to what inclusive classroom approaches looked like. and then at High Point University now where we have also done some interventions that have been really successful in closing that performance gap. We now are employing a model where all faculty who teach our introductory biology courses are on board with employing these techniques that intentionally address the affective domain of learning.

John: What techniques did you use at High Point to address the affective domain?

Angela: When I came to High Point University five years ago, of course we pulled up some of the institutional data, the historic data regarding performance of students in our introductory biology courses and of course saw that performance gap, a long-standing one. And so we really tried to build a model that built upon the knowledge I gained in Wisconsin about the importance of building community and addressing the affective domain of learning, we then attempted to employ that uniformly at High Point University. This time in the actual courses themselves and not with these optional outside of the class activities, so at High Point now we’ve got all instructors on board employing approaches in the classroom where they then administer to students our weekly messages that address the affective domain of learning and it involves growth mindset strategies, which is based on the work of the Stanford psychologist Dr. Carol Dweck who wrote a book on growth mindset strategies. And what we are doing at High Point University is providing students with weekly growth mindset messages maybe 5 or 10 minutes at the start of the course on Monday or Tuesday. I prepare maybe two or three PowerPoint slides with a growth mindset message that I send to all instructors before the start of the week and then they show that message to students and they reinforce the message throughout the week. And just to review what it means to employ growth mindset strategies; if a person has a growth mindset they believe that with hard work and persistence they can improve at whatever it is that they are doing. If a person has a fixed mindset they believe that essentially we are how we are and maybe you’re born a science person or maybe you’re born not a science person, maybe you’re a math person, maybe you’re not a math person and so students that have a fixed mindset will very much back away from things that challenge them because if they engage in an activity that challenges them and maybe they don’t perform so well with respect to that academic opportunity, they view that as a negative commentary on their intellect and who wants to publicly out themselves as being not smart or not good at something, so they will shy away from that and of course that has a very negative impact on their performance in the classroom, they don’t seek out the help that they need, if they vomit test they don’t go in and figure out what went wrong in that test. By sending them weekly growth mindset messages we’re telling them we believe you hang in there with hard work and with really smart use of resources that are available to you and figuring out what an effective study strategy is for you, you’re going to be successful in this course, we think you can do it now let’s get down to work. And long story short those growth mindset strategies have been very powerful in helping us close the performance gap, also now at High Point University in our introductory biology courses.

John: What would be some examples of those messages?

Angela: I would send out a variety of messages the ending on the week, some of them were science related and some weren’t. Maybe there was an interesting study that I read over the weekend on neuroplasticity and so of course being biology majors they would have an interest in that you can literally change your brain with practice. There was one study I sent a couple of slides showing MRIs of the brain in people who had intentionally performed or intentionally practiced a video game, it was a race car game where they practice going around a particular track for maybe two hours worth of practice and these MRIs showed literally their brain was changing in response to those two hours of practice so that was one example. I chose things outside of the realm of science and maybe one week we had a couple of slides on NBA superstar Michael Jordan and the fact that he didn’t make his high school basketball team, he got cut from his basketball team but again with hard work and persistence and employing the right strategies he was arguably the greatest basketball player of all times. We have a really funny clip from a Nobel laureates Junger report card from back in his grade school days about his teacher saying you’re never going to be any good at science, you just need to give it up and later he went on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in cloning. These are just a few examples of growth mindset messages that we sent to students on a weekly basis.

Rebecca: Have you noticed a difference between the in-class strategies of growth mindset versus community-focused TOSS workshops that you had done at Green Bay?

Angela: Both have been effective in closing the gap. They’re two very different academic settings, so one thing that the TOSS workshops were really great for in Green Bay was really fostering a sense of community among a group of students, many of whom were commuter students. And so they’d go to classes and then they’d leave the campus, they vacate the premises and we would never see them hanging out and studying up by our offices or engaging in social activities that involve their peers in science and with the implementation of these TOSS workshops we saw much more of that, we saw students hanging around after hours talking more with their professors. So I saw a significant change in our sense of community particularly with our underrepresented minority students in Green Bay as a result of those TOSS workshops. It’s I would argue much easier to address the community issues in certain respects at High Point University because we’re a private institution, students are required to live on campus, there are all sorts of social activities to engage them all the time. Now whether or not they’re feeling a strong sense of community or developing a strong sense of trust with the faculty that teach their science courses or feeling a sense of belonging I think what we’ve done with growth mindset strategies is heighten all of that with our High Point University students. So they’re two very different models, I think they are very well suited for those very specific institutional contexts. I have to tell you that when I first got to High Point University I tried the TOSS workshop model and nobody came because it was optional, it was outside of class at a time where quite frankly there were lots of other social events happening on campus, extracurricular activities, students are involved in so many different clubs on campus so that just was a model that wasn’t going to fly here, we needed to do something specifically in the classroom to catch those students when we had our captive audience.

Rebecca: It’s really fascinating to hear those differences, but also recognize that you need to adjust your design based on context.

Angela: I think context is a huge deal.

John: Did you make any other changes at High Point besides adding the growth mindset prompts?

Angela: What we did within the classroom was more than simply take these intentional approaches to address the affective domain of learning through the use of growth mindset strategy. So we also very intentionally changed the way we taught our foundation biology courses by also making sure that we were employing best practices to address the cognitive domain of learning. Prior to when I had come to High Point University lecture was the primary mode of teaching in our introductory biology courses and there was a lot of turnover that happened when I arrived, there were curricular changes, the hiring of many new junior faculty just in response to the growth of our program and as we hired these new faculty we were very intentional in training them in approaches that would involve active learning in the classroom. And we worked very hard with the instructors that teach multiple sections of this introductory biology course to standardize our curriculum in a way to make sure that students were getting exposure to active learning, best practices for addressing the cognitive domain of learning in addition to those that address the affective domain of learning with the growth mindset strategies. And what we found one year when we ran simply the active learning approach where we covered at least 25% of the material in those introductory biology courses with active learning strategies, but didn’t employ the growth mindset approaches. We still, with some of our underrepresented groups, still saw a gap— a performance gap. So again, while some studies have shown that active learning can help to close that gap or narrow that gap, we weren’t very successful in doing that at High Point University. Active learning alone didn’t do it for us and I think that’s an important point to make for whatever reason. It could be our institutional context, it could be a lot of different things, but my point is when we combined active learning with approaches that also address the emotional or affective components of learning, that’s when we hit the sweet spot. We needed to do both of those to close the performance gap.

John: What specific active learning strategies did you introduce?

Angela: Active learning strategies that are chosen by the instructors— they are individual. All of them use student-centered discussions of the primary scientific literature so that’s one of the outcomes of that introductory biology course. For us to introduce our first-year students right away to the primary scientific literature, so that’s one approach I know. Instructors, we primarily leave it up to them to choose what they want to do when we have people join our program or begin teaching our introductory biology courses. We provide them with that Bible of students under learning techniques called Collaborative Learning Techniques written by Elizabeth Barkley and her co-authors. They get that and I know a lot of them use that as their go-to manual if they want to set up an active learning strategy to cover a particular topic on any given day. They’ll employ maybe just simple think-parent shares or something more elaborate than that. That’s really up to the individual instructors to do it but we just ask that they spend about a quarter of their time doing that. We also revamped our laboratory sections associated with that course so that they are also much more student-centered. Now someone argue that laboratories by nature are active learning— I would argue that they’re not in the traditional way that they’re taught. Traditional labs are very cookbook in nature and performed in a way I would argue that don’t really actively engage the students brain. You come in, here’s what you do, settle this up and here’s what you should expect to see— that’s not at all what we’re now doing in these introductory biology courses. We are infusing scientific inquiry into pretty much every aspect of that course. Yes, covering the technical skills that they would need to be proficient cellular and molecular biologists but they’re also expected to come up with hypotheses to test and then use those technical skills as they design experiments, test their hypotheses, analyze their data, etc. So the labs also are very student-centered and, by the way, much more than 25 percent active learning happens in those labs— the majority of what happens is active learning. So when all is said and done, with the implementation of those active learning strategies along with their growth mindset messages, we’ve had a lot of success in enhancing the performance of our underrepresented students in closing the gaps.

Rebecca: One of the things that you mentioned in passing was training your faculty when they come in in active learning strategies and I imagine also these affective strategies as well.

Angela: Yes.

Rebecca: How do you employ that? Is that through a teaching and learning center on campus? Is this through your department? How does that work?

Angela: That is a good question. So when we had the addition of so many new faculty to our program— so one year, we had three new faculty. The next year, we had five new faculty. The year after that, we added two more. That’s huge turnover and again, reflects the growth that was happening in our program at the time. One thing that I did was I established a journal club— typically science departments have journal clubs where people present their data that they’re creating in lab or maybe they talk about a scientific paper. I set up a teaching and learning journal club where every other week, we would get together and talk about our recent publication in the scientific teaching and learning literature. And the new faculty who were coming in were really eager to learn this stuff because they wanted to improve their student outcomes and they wanted to be on board and teach in a way that was equitable within their classroom. So that was very helpful in terms of sharing with new faculty the findings regarding the evidence-based literature about the impact of these teaching practices on their student outcomes. So that was a really effective way to do it. Then that was the first year or two when everyone was on board and then, as happens, once people get their research programs established and then they start getting on committees, it became less and less likely that we would have a good turnout with our teaching and learning journal clubs. So my latest trick now is I just started a podcast that’s really focused on teaching in STEM and I’m calling it The Teaching Lab and my goal is to interview an innovator in STEM education every week or two who can share something about a recent publication in the teaching and learning literature that I can then share with my faculty. So it’s sort of an on-the-go professional development opportunity for them when they’re out what can their dog in the morning, they want to listen to a podcast or driving home at night because it’s becoming harder and harder as they establish themselves and now have their research programs up and running and they’re wanted in a million other areas on campus, it’s less likely that we will get together for this teaching and learning in the sciences journal. We call it our TLS Journal Club. We still have lunch together at least a couple of times a week and just bat ideas around and it’s a really wonderful community of colleagues I have here and I’m so fortunate in really having that journal club earlier on set the tone but now I’ve got to come up with other tricks because of the changes that have happened.

Rebecca: Looks like we’re all looking in the same bag of tricks, right? [LAUGHTER]

Angela: Well, it makes total sense.

John: Yeah, the asynchronous nature of podcast makes it a whole lot easier for people to fit it in their schedules.

Angela: Yes, and it’s easier then to sort of pick and choose. If there’s one podcast that eh, not so much use to me or of interest to me. I guess that’s probably more socially acceptable to skip listening to a podcast then just skip coming to a journal club and feeling the guilt associated with that.

Rebecca: You’re probably right. [LAUGHTER] What resources might you suggest for other faculty who want to work on reducing the performance gap in their classes?

Angela: It’s a good question. Just keeping up with the teaching and learning literature in the sciences. Life Sciences Education is a great resource that publishes a lot of evidence based up with respect to inclusivity, closing the performance gap, etc. I recommend Carol Dweck’s book on growth mindset to everybody and just going back and reading the classic literature by Claude Steele, the Stanford psychologist who did the original work on stereotype threat. Going back to those classic studies and looking at how profound the impact can be of stereotype threat, if you activate the threat of stereotype in a student, maybe it’s pointing out that women typically don’t perform as well as men in a math class. If an instructor just makes a statement like that before handing out an exam, it can have a profound impact on the performance of students. Just going back to read that classic literature about stereotype threat published by Claude Steele and colleagues and really thinking about how things we do in the classroom, totally unintentionally, can just have such a profound impact and how we really need to think about our messaging, and what we tell students, and the importance of building trust, and telling them that we believe in them, and also telling them you gotta work hard too, you know? And here’s how we’re gonna do that, here’s how we’re gonna progress this semester together, and here are the resources we can provide to you. Those are all wonderful resources, I think, for informing our teaching and really keeping at the fork front of our mind how incredibly important it is to address those emotional components of learning.

Rebecca: What are some of the strategies that you’ve used personally in your own classes in response to the work that you’ve done to improve inclusivity?

Angela: So I make sure, always, to be sending growth mindset messages to my students. If they don’t do well on a lab practical or don’t do well on an exam, I make sure to let them know that I believe in them and suggest to them alternative strategies or approaches that can help them to be successful. I work really hard, just generally, to foster a strong sense of community in my classroom, to invite students to come to my office hours even when there’s nothing wrong. Just come and hang out with me and let me know how your life is going. Fostering a sense of community is really important to help students feel like they belong. I try really hard to include in my classroom examples in discussions that are really culturally inclusive and that would reach a variety of learners. Right off the top of my head, those are things that I try to do on a regular basis. I try really hard to bring in speakers from underrepresented groups— scientific speakers from underrepresented groups because often, still, it’s a national phenomenon. We still see underrepresentation of certain ethnic groups within the sciences for sure. It’s less the case at least at undergraduate institutions that women are underrepresented. We’re seeing more and more women now in STEM disciplines, especially teaching at undergraduate institutions, but still we respect to scientists of color— very hard for our underrepresented minority students to find mentors who’ve had the same experiences that they’ve had. So while we work hard at High Point University to recruit faculty from diverse backgrounds and we’ve had some success in that regard, we could do better but we’ve had some success. We also try really hard to bring to campus scientists from underrepresented groups to meet with our students, to serve as role models for our students. That was very much the mode of operation for me in Wisconsin. I got some grant funding to make that happen in my students, who were able to interact with those scientists and be mentored by them, they still speak years later about what a significant impact that was on them in their life. So one example was Tyrone Hayes, who’s a very famous researcher at Berkeley, who is the guy that discovered how the pesticide atrazine is causing malformations and sex reversal in frogs and so forth. He is an African-American scientist who we had come and meet with our students in Wisconsin, talk about his research of course, but also just spend a lot of time during his visit hanging out with students and sharing his experiences and that really had a profound impact on them that they still talked about to this day.

Rebecca: Sometimes it’s things that seem so little to us that are so big to our students.

Angela: Absolutely.

Rebecca: We had a lot of interesting and exciting things going on but we always ask: what’s coming next?

Angela: What’s coming next? [LAUGHTER] I have a lot of data that I’m analyzing right now about the impact or growth mindset strategies on men versus women. I want to see if there’s a difference in responsiveness to the messaging in our male versus female students so there’s that. We’ve also implemented some growth mindset messaging in our introductory chemistry courses and we’re looking to see if they have the same impact in the chemistry courses as well, which is enough for now truthfully.

Rebecca: It seems like plenty.

Angela: Beyond that, you know we now have adopted growth mindset approaches as our campus quality enhancement proposal. So I made a pitch to our faculty when it came time to choose a new QEP topic that growth mindset strategies would really be an effective approach for addressing some of the problems that faculty/staff had identified that they encountered with students that frustrated them that they would like to see some approach adopted at our institution to address. Like students shying away from challenges or not really digging in when they were bumping up against obstacles within the classroom. Growth mindset strategies are incredibly effective for changing the way that students approach problem solving in the way that they feel about failure or challenges. It really helps them to be more resilient. Messaging itself is incredibly effective, we knew that that was the case in the k-12 setting based on Carol Dweck and colleagues work but now we and others are finding that in higher ed classrooms, likewise, they have a profound effect. So the growth mindset strategies and the messaging and the impact on a variety of student learning outcomes are now being employed High Point University campus pretty much universally in a variety of different disciplines and even within student life.

John: Well thank you, you’ve offered some wonderful suggestions that I think would be useful not just in the STEM fields, but in all of our disciplines.

Rebecca: Definitely. Thank you so much for your time and great research that you’re doing. I look forward to hearing what else you find.

Angela: Thank you so much for having me Rebecca and John.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts, and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Theme music by Michael Gary Brewer.