2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Board 305: HSI Implementation and Evaluation Project: Commitment to Learning Instilled by Mastery-Based Undergraduate Program (CLIMB-UP)

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session

Grading practices have been identified as one of the main culprits in the persistence of equity gaps. Traditional grading methods can be inequitable, ineffective, and even damaging. The CLIMB-UP project (EHR: IUSE/HSI) aims to improve the institutional capacity to improve teaching and learning by utilizing Mastery-Based Grading (MBG) in key sophomore courses (i.e., Statics, Strengths of Materials, Fluid Mechanics, Dynamics, and Embedded Systems) at three very-high enrolling Hispanic-Serving Institutions. CLIMB-UP is a three-year professional development program for faculty to support redesigning and implementing sophomore-level “gateway” engineering courses into a Mastery Grading approach and documenting its effect on students’ academic profiles. Mastery grading is a form of grading based on (1) measurable learning outcomes tied to curricular goals, (2) eventual mastery of the material, not artificial checkpoints during a term, and (3) multiple opportunities to show mastery, with no penalty for failed attempts.

We are nearing the end of this project's Year 2 Course Redesign Phase. We have developed a hybrid faculty development course to train faculty to redesign their courses to use Mastery-Based grading. Using a team approach, faculty have identified core course material and written clear, assessable learning outcomes, determined an appropriate grading architecture, aligned assessment types and learning outcomes, and built course timelines. Thus far, the result of the project has been progressing through the MBG redesign and shifting faculty’s mindset. The preliminary evaluation of faculty’s MBG experience found that while MBG is intended to shift students’ perspective away from getting a good grade and toward learning and acquiring mastery, immersion in MBG is also having an impact on the way faculty think about teaching and learning. Instead of thinking about what students need to learn in their own course, faculty reported that they now think about the courses both upstream and downstream from their course. Faculty interviews and case studies following three members of the MBG team through the steps of learning, designing, implementing, and improving MGB are discussed in the companion paper.

The student-focus component of the CLIMB-UP project aims to understand how the mastery grading learning environment impacts first-generation college students’ academic motivation, attitudes, mindsets about their abilities to learn, and persistence beliefs (i.e., students’ academic profile) over time. Thus far, we have collected the beginning-and-end of-semester survey responses in the Fall 2021 and Spring 2022 of students who were not part of the ‘official’ mastery learning implementation courses. Our aim is to compare students’ academic profiles before-and-after MBG. By the end of Fall 2022 we will have collected both beginning-and-end of semester survey responses with a cohort of students receiving the ‘official’ mastery-based course redesign. We have already conducted pairwise t-test for each dataset classified as before MBG. Additionally, two rounds of semi-structured interviews have been conducted with a cohort of 8 students to understand how their academic profiles are shifting. In the companion paper, we will provide brief vignettes of students that qualitatively capture some of the academic profile shifts we are quantitatively observing.

Authors

Dr. Dina Verdin http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-6048-1104 Arizona State University [biography]

Dina Verdín, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Engineering in the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at Arizona State University. She graduated from San José State University with a BS in Industrial Systems Engineering and from Purdue University with an MS in Industrial Engineering and PhD in Engineering Education. Dina is a 2016 recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship and an Honorable Mention for the Ford Foundation Fellowship Program. Her research interest focuses on changing the deficit base perspective of first-generation college students by providing asset-based approaches to understanding this population. Dina is interested in understanding how first-generation college students author their identities as engineers and negotiate their multiple identities in the current culture of engineering. Dina has won several awards including the 2022-2023 Outstanding Research Publication Award by the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division I, 2018 ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference Best Diversity Paper Award, 2019 College of Engineering Outstanding Graduate Student Research Award and the Alliance for Graduate Education and the Professoriate (AGEP) Distinguished Scholar Award. Dina's dissertation proposal was selected as part of the top 3 in the 2018 American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division D In-Progress Research Gala.
Sharona Krinsky California State University, Los Angeles [biography]

Sharona Krinsky is an instructor and course coordinator in the Mathematics department at California State University, Los Angeles and the co-PI of the NSF funded project "Commitment to Learning Instilled by a Mastery-Based Undergraduate Program (CLIMB-UP). She works with faculty on redesigning courses to utilize the principles of mastery-based grading in order to enhance student success and enable increased equity, inclusion, and access to careers in STEM fields for students from historically underrepresented groups. Sharona is a founding organizer of "The Grading Conference", an annual two-day online conference focused on reforming grading as we know it across STEM fields throughout higher education, now entering its fifth year. She coordinates a large general education Quantitative Reasoning with Statistics course for over 1,400 students per year as well as teaches a wide range of mathematics courses including Calculus and Linear Algebra.
Dr. David Raymond P.E. California State University, Los Angeles [biography]

Dr. Raymond is a professor of mechanical engineering at Cal State LA. His teaching focus is on fundamental solid mechanics courses. His research interests are in the area of applied injury biomechanics and engineering pedagogy.
Eva Schiorring STEMEVAL [biography]

Eva Schiorring has almost two decades of experience in research and evaluation and special knowledge about STEM education in community colleges and four-year institutions. She presently serves as the external evaluator for four NSF-funded projects. The
Dr. Emily L. Allen California State University, Los Angeles [biography]

Emily L. Allen, Ph.D., is Dean of the College of Engineering, Computer Science, and Technology at California State University, Los Angeles. She believes in a collaborative, student-centered approach to research, education, academic administration and lea
Carlos Luis Perez Arizona State University, Polytechnic Campus

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