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Teaching Commons

Equity and Belonging in STEM Lab Courses

STEM labs are unique learning spaces that offer specific opportunities and challenges for supporting the learning of students from diverse backgrounds.

This resource identifies course design elements and practical strategies to make STEM lab courses more equitable and accessible to students of all backgrounds.

High-impact instructional practices

These instructional practices can be implemented in many STEM contexts to improve the learning experience for all students:

  • Share learning goals: explicitly link lab activities and exercises to learning goals, and help students understand what they need to do to achieve the lab and field course learning goals.
  • Support and structure equitable collaborative work and intra-team communication by building teams and assigning partners with a range of previous experience and interests, using and rotating assigned roles.
  • Incorporate experiments that allow students to pursue an unknown answer instead of a predetermined solution.

Instructional practices by lab course element

These evidence-based strategies to support fairness, participation, and student success in lab courses are organized by course element.

Learning goals, assessments, and grading

  • Choose and assess course-level learning goals that are authentic and transferable.
  • Incorporate learning goals that support student learning about the institutions, practice, and training paths in science.
  • Base grades on consistent assignment completion, effort, resilience, and creativity, and support student learning with constructive feedback and encouragement.
  • To reflect the research process, give students opportunities to practice, revise, iterate, or reassess in lab and field courses.
  • Allow students to demonstrate learning in multiple ways, including written work, presentations, and technical assessments.
  • Apply student-centered or backward design to support authentic final projects.
  • Scaffold learning with smaller assignments that develop basic lab and field, data analysis, and science communication skills, and allow students to develop confidence in their abilities.
  • Evaluate if assessments are focused on helping students meet the course learning goals.
  • Name and define important lab and field skills. Be clear about the purpose of assignments, criteria, and pathways for success.
  • Share opportunities and teach the process for obtaining mentored research positions.
  • To support growth and collaboration in a challenging learning environment, consider using satisfactory/no-credit grading, criterion-referenced grading, or an alternative to score-based grading. Grading on a curve (using a normal distribution) is not suitable for the purposeful activity of lab and field course learning and can exacerbate  inequities.

Stanford course design resources

Variability in previous laboratory and research experience

Lab and field courses can support learners with many levels of experience and help close the preparation gap among students. In these courses the smaller sections, closer interactions between students and the teaching team, and emphasis on active learning in particular support this goal.

  • Share learning goals, link activities and exercises directly to learning goals, and help students understand what they need to do to achieve the course learning goals
  • Introduce and practice basic techniques in the first lab section meeting.
  • Include supporting links in pre-course materials to help students find additional information, particularly those who may be less familiar with some concepts.
  • Create supplemental videos, host lab or field preview sessions, or dedicate office hours to less prepared students to allow students opportunities to gain familiarity with the learning spaces and instruments.
  • At the start of the course, survey students about their experience and the challenges they expect to encounter.
  • Assign ungraded or low-stakes assessments or self-reflections to gauge student understanding early in the course. Direct students who need additional support to meet with a teaching team member.

Stanford coaching and tutoring resources

Learning space accessibility

Lab and field courses provide an excellent opportunity for students to learn about safety and norms, and practice doing the science they are learning. By discussing norms and belonging as a learning community, all students can recognize responsibilities and barriers, and work with each other and instructors to create a more supportive learning community.

  • To support the participation and learning of students with disabilities, instructors can research universal design principles in their field and collaborate with a home institution’s office of accessible education staff to provide accommodations.
  • Use universal design principles and examine ways to include students with physically-limiting disabilities (e.g., wheelchair users, people with low vision and color vision deficiency) as well as non-physically limiting disabilities (e.g., ADHD, autism). 

Stanford accessibility resources

Representation and science identity

Lab and field courses can present the training steps, scientific contributions, and career achievements of a broad range of scientists. Building a lab and field course teaching team of faculty, instructors, and TAs of wide-ranging backgrounds can promote engagement and communication with students from underrepresented and first-generation and/or low-income backgrounds.

  • Share materials highlighting the experimental work and training of underrepresented scientists at different stages in their careers.
  • Have students create an asset map to recognize their skills and strengths.
  • Create a lab and field culture of safety (including psychological safety), productivity, and shared success.
  • Discuss learning from failed experiments and growth mindset. For example, curate and share posts and articles from scientists that highlight their challenges, successes, and frustrations within the larger community of science and engineering.
  • Have students reflect on their growth and learning through the course.
  • Recruit, train, and support TAs and teaching team members who bring diverse perspectives and backgrounds to the teaching team.

Stanford resources for representation and science identity

Structuring and facilitating group work

In authentic research, a large part of science is completed by interdependent research teams. Practice in teamwork and communication develops valuable transferable skills.

  • Support and structure equitable collaborative work and intra-team communication by building teams and assigning partners with a range of previous experience and interests. Assign roles that regularly rotate.
  • Give teams the opportunity to create team norms and charters, and provide sound guidelines for mediating conflicts. Use class time and assignments to reflect on team interactions and communicate with teammates.
  • Have student teams create a team asset chart and discuss the value of divergent thinking at various project stages.

Stanford resources for group work

Lab projects and exercises

Research projects and exercises that seek novel findings for relevant questions through iteration and collaboration better model authentic science and engineering tasks and can improve student self-efficacy and persistence in STEM.

  • Select exercises guided by the course learning goals.
  • Allowing student-designed research questions can boost project ownership and engagement.
  • Having students reflect on the challenges and failures that occur when running a course-based research project can enhance their perception of the authenticity of the research.
  • Engaging in authentic community issues and partnering with outside stakeholders (e.g., place-based learning and community-engaged learning) can improve student belonging and persistence.
  • Traditional lab and field courses that focus on technical skills by having students achieve an expected outcome can be incrementally adjusted to incorporate short, authentic inquiry projects that last for just one or a few weeks.
  • Incorporate real experiments that all ow students to pursue an unknown answer instead of a predetermined solution.
  • Gradually build the complexity and challenge of lab work to allow students to build familiarity with concepts and skills, and confidence in their abilities

Stanford resource for projects and exercises

Teaching team and student interactions  

Longer lab and field class meeting times and a decentralized learning community focus allow teaching team members to interact with students and student teams to a greater extent than most classroom environments.

  • Teaching team members can share the arc of their lab and field skills development and express belief in their students’ ability to learn and succeed.
  • Teaching team members should be prepared to intervene to uphold lab and field norms that support equity and belonging.
  • Instructors can maximize interaction with students (e.g., one-on-one dialog, questioning students, and student teams) and serve as a “guide-on-the-side” by intentionally engaging in these activities and minimizing time spent lecturing, monitoring, and completing administrative tasks.
  • Discuss course design elements and teaching practices that support equity and belonging with teaching assistants.
  • Instructors should discuss student engagement and lab partner or team performance with TAs during regular teaching team meetings.

Stanford resources for interactions

Scheduling and course costs

Long blocks of time used in lab and field courses allow students to experience the time that protocols and exercises take. This allows them to better understand what doing science entails and learn to appropriately sequence and schedule lab and field tasks.

If students are aware of the cost of consumables, equipment, and human resources, they can evaluate the accessibility of science and the benefits of low-cost and adaptable technologies.

  • Ensure that students receive course credit equivalent to their ‘seat time’ and outside of lab- and field-associated analysis and work.
  • Because many students have work, caretaking, or other obligations outside of their scheduled class time, provide asynchronous and remote opportunities to view and support tasks that occur outside of class time.
  • Allow for different project speeds across the classroom, or schedule class sessions that repeat to allow students to revise or retry their initial work.
  • Integrate research-based lab courses into the required curriculum so that all students make progress towards their degree by participating.

Stanford resources for scheduling and course costs

Course assessment

Instructors can assess their lab and field courses without comparison groups to better understand student learning gains and student experiences.

  • Instructors can assess if learning outcomes and course goals are being met using a combination of student-perception surveys and outcome-measuring coursework.
  • Instructors can look for evidence of broad access or barriers to learning for particular groups of students. For example, instructors can assess course performance by asking targeted questions in formative and summative course evaluations and monitoring the learning gains and grade outcomes of their students.
  • Instructors can set up exit interviews with students who dropped the lab course or experienced course concepts or peer interaction challenges to better understand how to address major barriers for this subset of students.

Stanford resources for course assessment

Evaluation & Research, Student Affairs

 

Acknowledgements

This guide is based on Equity and Inclusion in STEM Lab Courses, developed by Alex Engel and contributors from the Stanford Center for Teaching and Learning. Refer to the full document for more recommendations, references, and suggested resources.

For questions or feedback, contact Alex Engel at aengel@stanford.edu.

Equity and Inclusion in STEM Lab Courses: Teaching Practices Guide for Lab Course Development and Iteration (2022) by Alex Engel is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.