2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

ECR: Creating transformational STEM education: A metasynthesis mapping a decade of systemic change research

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

Significant research has been devoted to enhancing STEM-related pedagogical practices that produce better academic outcomes for undergraduate students from different educational and social backgrounds (Freeman et al., 2014; Kober, 2015; NASEM, 2021; NRC, 2012). Despite the proliferation of researchers across various educational disciplines focused on STEM-related pedagogical practices, less effort has been devoted to systematic analyses of change-related practices and how these studies adopt specific theories of change and their strategies for dissemination. A previous NSF-funded project (Henderson et al., 2011) addressed this gap by conducting a thorough interdisciplinary literature review of research devoted to changes in undergraduate STEM instructional practices, illuminating the various theories of change employed by different scholarly communities to improve undergraduate STEM education. The theoretical insights from this metasynthesis have been a widely cited resource for scholarly communities devoted to STEM-related instructional practices (Dogan, 2023); however, the proliferation of research in the decade plus since its publication requires a new analysis incorporating more recent research. Our NSF ECR project conducts an extensive multi-method metasynthesis of literature published between 2011 and 2023 on strategies for enhancing undergraduate STEM instruction. Specifically, we updated the previous review and examined the change strategies implemented after the publication of the prior work. Through keyword searches in academic databases and Google Scholar (n = 9,262), 414 articles were included after the title and abstract and full-text screening. We conducted qualitative coding on the content of the articles, utilizing key codes from the prior study and developing new ones to capture important dynamics of change initiatives. A team of four team members coded a set of articles collectively and held multiple training sessions to reach adequate reliability for coding all categories (e.g., change strategies, the change agent, the target of change, and the disciplinary patterns; all coding categories will be described in the full paper). Henderson et al.’s (2011) original analysis included (n=191) articles and developed four conceptual categories to illuminate the change strategies employed within the research articles: Disseminating Curriculum and Pedagogy (n=58, 30.4%), Developing Reflective Teachers (n=64, 33.5%), Enacting Policy (n=53, 27.7%), and Developing a Shared Vision (n=16, 8.4%). The team used these conceptual categories to identify any shifts in the change strategy utilized within the 414 articles included in the update. The team found an increase in Disseminating Curriculum and Pedagogy strategies (n=145, 35.4%) and Developing a Shared Vision (n=73, 17.6%), while fewer change agents employed Developing Reflective Teacher strategies (n=121, 29.2%) and Enacting Policy strategies (n=62, 15.0%). The larger paper will discuss the limitations of the four conceptual categories in capturing recent moves in STEM-related strategies, as (n=13, 3.1%) of the updates did not fit within the categories as currently articulated. In addition, the larger paper will also present descriptive statistics on the four change strategies and the research communities producing the articles included in the analysis, along with federal or private funding sources.

Authors

Dr. Rachel L Renbarger FHI 360 [biography]

Rachel Renbarger, PhD, is an Educational Researcher with FHI 360, a nonprofit focused on improving wellbeing globally. As a rural, first-generation, and low-income student and former teacher and professor, her research interests include utilizing best practices in research methods along with increasing educational access and success in higher education. Part of her research methods work focuses on improving the research-to-practice pipeline and thus works to increase transparency and confidence in educational research through the inclusion of critical lenses and appropriate open science practices.
Dr. Ying Wang http://orcid.org/https://0000-0001-9352-3342 FHI 360 [biography]

Ying Wang is a senior research associate in the U.S. Education Department at FHI360. She earned her Ph.D. in Educational Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University and Master of Education at Temple University. Ying is an educational psychologist who conducts research on examining how students learn and the effective ways to support students’ learning and their academic and professional successes.
Emily Bolger
Taylor Boyd Western Michigan University [biography]

Taylor Boyd (he/him) is a PhD student in Higher Education Leadership at Western Michigan University. As a Thurgood Marshall Fellow, his research focuses on policy and shared vision strategies for enacting change in higher education. As a full-time administrator, Taylor’s expertise focuses on leading efforts in faculty development, learning outcomes assessment, and institutional accreditation.
Prof. Noah D Finkelstein http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4783-4964 University of Colorado Boulder [biography]

Noah Finkelstein is a Professor and Vice Chair in the department of Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder. He conducts research is in physics education, specifically studying the conditions that support students' identities, engagement and outcomes in physics - developing models of context. In parallel, he conducts research on how educational transformations get taken up, spread, and sustained. He is a PI in the Physics Education Research (PER) group and was founding co-director of CU's Center for STEM Learning. He co-directs the national Network of STEM Education Centers, is building the STEM DBER-Alliance, and coalitions advancing undergraduate education transformation. He is involved in education policy serving on many national boards, sits on a National Academies' STEM education roundtable, is a Trustee of the Higher Learning Commission, is a Fellow of both the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Presidential Teaching Scholar and the inaugural Timmerhaus Teaching Ambassador for the University of Colorado system.
Dr. Scott Simkins North Carolina A&T State University [biography]

Scott P. Simkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He conducts economic education research with emphasis on the use and diffusion of evidence-based teaching practices, both within economics and across disciplines.
Dr. Charles Henderson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0334-6739 Western Michigan University [biography]

Charles Henderson is a Professor at Western Michigan University (WMU), with a joint appointment between the Physics Department and the WMU Mallinson Institute for Science Education. He is the Director of the Mallinson Institute and co-Founder and co-Direc
Marcos Caballero

Note

The full paper will be available to logged in and registered conference attendees once the conference starts on June 21, 2026, and to all visitors after the conference ends on June 24, 2026

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