Association of American Colleges and Universities

For the past 20 years, countless reports have been issued calling for change and reform of undergraduate education to improve student learning and success in STEM; however, by many measures, recommendations in these reports have not been widely implemented.  Systemic change in higher education has proven difficult and research suggests that a focus on helping instructors implement more active, student-centered pedagogies will have an impact.  Research further suggests that the greatest gains in STEM education are likely to come from the development of strategies to encourage faculty and administrators to implement proven instructional strategies rather than to carry out additional research on these strategies.  Isolated efforts are not likely to yield the kind of widespread change described in national reports because colleges and universities are complex systems wherein multiple factors influence faculty actions, values and behaviors.  Existing reports rarely come with campus-level recommendations for institutional level changes or leadership actions required for implementing innovations and reforms on a wider scale.  Project Kaleidoscope, a national STEM reform organization housed at the American Association of Colleges and Universities, proposes to develop a comprehensive institutional STEM Effectiveness Framework to help campus leaders translate national report recommendations into scalable and sustainable institutional actions that improve recruitment, access, retention, learning and completion for all students in all STEM disciplines.