Designing for Impact: Recommendations for Curriculum Developers and Change Agents

Many innovations in teaching undergraduate STEM courses have been developed in the past 30 years, but few have been widely adopted. As part of a NSF-funded project designed to increase the impact of STEM education development efforts we have examined this problem from several perspectives. This talk will describe our model of how curriculum developers and change agents can plan for development and dissemination of new instructional strategies and teaching materials in ways that are likely to impact teaching practices. Development of this model was informed by (1) studies of typical development and dissemination practices, (2) studies of instructional strategies and teaching materials that have had a large impact, and (3) review of the related literature.