Impact of undergraduate science course innovations on learning.

1269 EDUCATIONFORUM A t many colleges and universities, the traditional model of science instruc-tion—a professor lecturing a large group of students—is being transformed into one in which students play a more active role in learning. This has been attributed to mounting evidence that traditional lectures, recitations, and laboratory sessions do not guarantee that students develop deep understanding of critical concepts (1– 5). Since 1991, the National Science Foundation (NSF) increased its support to research projects that reconceptualize undergraduate science instruction. The resulting increase of " student-centered " instructional innovations studies raises questions, for example: How do these undergraduate course innovations vary? Do student-centered innovations in undergraduate science courses have a positive impact on student learning? These types of questions motivated a 3-year, NSF-funded research study that intended to characterize undergraduate course innovations described in published journal articles and to quantify their impact on student learning in biology, chemistry, engineering, and physics courses. We expand upon prior studies (6– 8) to consider more types of innovations from more disciplines. Unlike other syntheses, we did not rely on terms used by authors to refer to their innovations, as names may refl ect a general term (e.g., technology) with different meanings. Instead, we classifi ed studies based on four, non–mutually exclusive innovations: conceptually oriented tasks (COTs), collaborative learning (CL), technology (TECH), and inquiry-based projects (IBPs) (see the fi rst table). Our categories allowed characterization of innovations in more detail than in previous syntheses (8). Five inclusion criteria were used to screen articles during the literature search: (i) focus on undergraduate education in biology , chemistry, engineering, or physics; (ii) inclusion of one or more student-centered innovations; (iii) set in a " real-world " regular classroom and/or laboratory environment, as opposed to conducted in an education laboratory ; (iv) published in a peer-reviewed journal between 1990 and 2007; and (v) results communicated in English. [See supporting online material (SOM) for details about study methods.] Of the 868 articles on course innovations gathered, 82, 18, 23, and 74 described at least one comparative study in biology, chemistry, engineering, or physics, respectively. Comparative studies involve a contrast between students who have and have not received a given instructional innovation (i.e., treatment versus control), making it possible to evaluate the effect of course innovations on student learning. The unit of analysis was " study, " a unique set of data collected under a single research plan from …