Author(s):
It is well documented that students often struggle with relatively basic STEM skills used in introductory physics courses, such as algebra, trigonometry, and vector math, that are necessary for success for STEM majors and students in health professions. This project is aimed at addressing this critical STEM issue by expanding “STEM Fluency”, an online learning application for helping students to become more fluent (accuracy + speed) with such critical skills. STEM Fluency is an existing and empirically successful research-based online platform used at Ohio State University in its first-semester introductory physics courses with over 15,000 students for the past 8 years. While we continue to build on this success, we also recognize that our work has mainly been conducted in the somewhat narrow context of the first semester introductory physics course sequences at a large public research university. To address the needs of STEM education in a broader higher-ed context, we are collaborating with instructors at other institutions, including HBCU’s and community colleges, to iteratively improve, expand, implement, assess, and document the effectiveness of online mastery learning of basic STEM skills via STEM Fluency for more diverse contexts, populations, and content material. Key features of this project collaboration will be the engagement in iterative design and feedback on relevance and usability with instructors and students, as well as the analysis of student data. Analytics include measuring the evolution of accuracy and speed as well as student self-efficacy in STEM and basic system skills.
Coauthors
heckler.6@osu.edu
