At many undergraduate institutions, introductory level laboratories are separated by discipline, tend to be prescriptive, and either emphasize quantitative aspects of STEM without meaningful context or do not foster improvements in quantitative reasoning. Students often declare STEM majors before they have the ability to deeply explore how material in the STEM fields is applied to solve real-world problems that transcend any one discipline. Research has suggested that STEM retention in the first year of college is negatively affected by changing majors or failing STEM classes and positively affected by taking more STEM course requirements and being successful in those attempts. In addition, a lack of essential quantitative reasoning skills is also likely to contribute to underperformance in early STEM courses. STEM retention in general is linked to a student's interest in the application of STEM to a career, implying that contextualizing STEM learning as soon as possible is of particular importance. Providing relevance for quantitative reasoning skills might motivate students to recognize the importance of critical thinking in STEM and foster persistence when rigor in first year courses becomes difficult for underprepared students. This presentation describes a newly implemented one semester STEM laboratory course developed for students early in their college careers that fully integrates introductory level topics from Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics. Assessment of quantitative literacy and reasoning using a Quantitative Literacy and Reasoning Assessment indicates that students participating in this transdisciplinary lab showed greater learning gains in quantitative literacy and reasoning, and this gain was statistically significantly higher than students in traditionally taught Biology classes. The impact on STEM retention for students in the newly developed transdisciplinary lab is also explored. Together, the data suggest that an early transdisciplinary approach may better prepare students to meet future workforce demands by increasing students’ ability to reason quantitatively and might also motivate students to persist in STEM fields by developing their interest the field's relevance to real-world problems.<br/>

Contextualizing STEM with first year transdisciplinary laboratories

255th National Meeting (2018)

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