We summarize the experiences and outcomes for 'discipline-based education specialists' involved with a large-scale, 10-year initiative: the Carl Wieman Science Education Initiative at the University of British Columbia. A key aspect of the initiative was the hiring of these specialists into academic departments where they held graduate-level education in a matching discipline, often coupled with teaching experience. We draw upon various data sources to provide a rich, longitudinal picture of the experiences and career trajectories of these academic developers and explore the skills, behaviours, and supports they perceive as critical for changing and advancing instructional practices and departmental culture in higher education. We also discuss how embedding agents of change this way is a successful model for the transformation of institutional norms in undergraduate education.

Astronomy evokes deep curiosity for many people, making it a beautiful topic for supporting students to learn scientific practices and develop as scientists. We present an inquiry-based lab sequence about distances in the Universe, which we have taught in a first-year astronomy course in Canada and in a summer program for upper-year students in West Africa. Students begin with two warm-up labs where they discover the methods of parallax and the inverse-square law for light to measure distances in their everyday lives. Then they engage in a mini research project in which they ask their own questions about astronomical images, then break down their big questions into smaller questions related to measuring astronomical distances. Students work together in teams to investigate their questions, and finally present their findings to their classmates. Students developing their own questions to investigate is a key scientific practice that is not included in many other inquiry lab curricula. We show evidence that students learned astronomical concepts, had positive feelings about the labs, appreciated the freedom to come up with their own approaches in the labs, and built their self-efficacy as scientists. Since facilitating inquiry is quite different from other kinds of teaching, we describe key features of our facilitation including how we teach new instructors. We describe our curriculum in both Canada and West Africa and offer suggestions for future implementations. We encourage other astronomy instructors to try an inquiry approach to help students develop as scientists while exploring topics they

Learning and development form a key feature of the acquisition and maintenance of expertise. Although this might be pursued as a solo activity, models of professional learning emphasise the importance and value of other people's input as guides, mentors or coaches at all stages of a professional career. Furthermore, dialogue around learning and teaching is considered to be important for constructing meaning and professional identity and is widely and effectively used to support critical reflection on practice. This chapter offers a composite of four short pieces that describe different approaches to supporting professional learning in higher education through collaboration and mentoring. As well as providing practical examples, the approaches also reveal the two-way nature of such learning support and highlight the benefits to mentees and their mentors of this dialogic way of working.

ABSTRACT The online homework system WeBWorK has been successfully used at several hundred colleges and universities. Despite its popularity, the WeBWorK system does not provide detailed metrics of student performance to instructors. In this article, we illustrate how an analysis of the log files of the WeBWorK system can provide information such as the amount of time students spend on WeBWorK assignments and how long they persist on problems. We estimate the time spent on an assignment by combining log file events into sessions of student activity. The validity of this method is confirmed by cross referencing with another time estimate obtained from a learning management system. As an application of these performance metrics, we contrast the behaviour of students with WeBWorK scores less than 50% with the remainder of the class in a first year Calculus course. This reveals that on average, the students who perform poorly on their homework start later, have shorter activity sessions, and are less persistent when solving problems. We conclude by discussing the implications of WeBWorK analytics for instructional practices and for the future of learning analytics in undergraduate mathematics education.

Faculty adoption of learning analytics is critical to advancing a data-informed culture in higher education. Faculty care deeply about their students and want to make the most of the limited instructional time they have with them. Until recently, it has been difficult for faculty to gauge the broad range of student backgrounds and abilities in their classes. Meanwhile, post-secondary institutions are rapidly adopting the use of analytical data to enhance learning, retention, and graduation rates. This chapter encompasses both theory and practice. In this multiple-case study we discuss the efforts of a Learning Analytics Research Collaborative at research intensive schools in the Bay View Alliance, a networked improvement community designed to address teaching cultures in higher education. The schools in this study share the common goal of providing analytical data to faculty for the improvement of student success at the course, program, and university levels. Our premise is that a data-informed culture can only be sustained in higher education when faculty engage in, and value scholarly inquiry about their own students, courses, and programs using institutional data. We describe our programs and collaboration within the Cycle of Progress for Sustainable Change Framework, and its relationship to five Complex Adaptive System principles.

Problem solving has been characterized as one of the ?employability skills? due to the high demand for such abilities in a modern workplace. Most universities do not monitor progress of the generic problem-solving skills (PSS) of their students due to a lack of available assessment tools. We used previously reported 15-min tests to measure the generic PSS of students over the first three years of university. More than 600 students participated in this study, including 144 who wrote PSS tests in Year 1 and then again in Year 3 of their studies. Two versions of the PSS test were administered in September and December of both years. We observed a non-linear increase in PSS test scores with a significant growth during the first three months of Year 1, a similar increase over the next 21 months, then no change during the first three months of Year 3. Further studies are necessary to pinpoint the instructional techniques and situational factors facilitating the PSS development of students over the first three years of studies. Moreover, the plateau we observe in the third year indicates that proactive steps by universities and individual instructors are required to advance this important skill set in upper-year students.

One goal of an undergraduate education in mathematics is to help students develop a productive disposition towards mathematics. A way of conceiving of this is as helping mathematical novices transition to more expert-like perceptions of mathematics. This conceptualization creates a need for a way to characterize students' perceptions of mathematics in authentic educational settings. This article presents a survey, the Mathematics Attitudes and Perceptions Survey (MAPS), designed to address this need. We present the development of the MAPS instrument and its validation on a large (N = 3411) set of student data. Results from various MAPS implementations corroborate results from analogous instruments in other STEM disciplines. We present these results and highlight some in particular: MAPS scores correlate with course grades; students tend to move away from expert-like orientations over a semester or year of taking a mathematics course; and interactive-engagement type lectures have less of a negative impact, but no positive impact, on students' overall orientations than traditional lecturing. We include the MAPS instrument in this article and suggest ways in which it may deepen our understanding of undergraduate mathematics education.

We report findings from a classroom experiment in which each of two sections of the same Calculus 1 course at a North American research-focused university were subject to an "intervention'' week, each for a different topic, during which a less-experienced instructor encouraged a much higher level of student engagement, promoted active learning (answering "clicker'' questions, small-group discussions, worksheets) during a significant portion of class time and built on assigned pre-class tasks. The lesson content and analysis of the assessments were informed by existing research on student learning of mathematics and student interviews, though the interventions and assessments were also intended to be compatible with typical course practices in an attempt to appeal to practitioners less familiar with the literature. Our study provides an example of active learning pedagogy (including materials and assessment used) for students at this level of mathematics in a classroom of over one hundred students, and we report improved student performance-on conceptual items in particular-with a switching replication in that each section outperformed the other on the topic for which it received the intervention.