PRISM: Changing Pedagogy of STEM Faculty
One claim is that introducing SM faculty to active learning strategies through institutes or academies for learning and providing incentives such as mini-grants will not only result in successful course interventions but also faculty will sustain and/or expand to other sections of the same course - taught by different faculty - and/or transfer to other courses taught by the same faculty. There is descriptive evidence cited above from the NE Georgia region to support this claim. There are many more IHE SM faculty involved in significant course modifications than had been the case before PRISM. There are similar results from the other three regions. Evidence to date is positive but is based on a small number of IHE faculty.
Evidence is also obtained to support the claim of success rates for students in mathematics. Data were collected on student success rates in Mathematical Modeling, College Algebra and Pre-Calculus. The percent of students passing (A, B, C) these courses, has increased each year from 2003-06 within the six PRISM institutions. For the USG system as a whole, the increase has been smaller with a slight decrease seen in 2005 for College Algebra and Pre-calculus. The PRISM institutions have a slightly higher percentage of students passing with an A, B, or C than the USG system. While one competing theory of improved student success is that only increased student effort will lead to increased student learning, it is unlikely that students in the six PRISM institutions behaved differently on average than students in the other 28 institutions. A more likely explanation is that faculty interventions in the courses in the six institutions increased student success.
Another claim is that inclusion of more active learning strategies in introductory science courses will increase science literacy and science proficiency. While only results of two correlational cases were cited above to support this claim, there is also evidence from many other cases. As of November 2007, over 15 articles stimulated by mini-grants have been accepted for publication.
