Co-chairs Vanessa Woods and Mike Wilton both joined WG2 because they were interested in applying interventions to their own classrooms. Woods and Wilton are associate teaching professors at the University of California Santa Barbara, with Woods working within the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences and Wilton working within the Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. I recently had the chance to catch up with Woods and Wilton, reflecting on WG2’s progress over the past few years and their perspectives as co-chairs. WG2, like Working Groups 1 and 3, was established at the 2019 SEISMIC Summer Meeting to help organize and encourage collaborative efforts. “We were perceived to be those that were gonna go in and tinker something in their classroom and see the impacts on student outcomes,” Wilton says.

In addition to establishing the Experiments Working Group at the Summer Meeting in 2019, four project ideas were proposed and taken on by participants. One of these was the Access to Practice (AtP) project, originally coordinated by Maggie Safronova and Linda Adler-Kassner. AtP involves faculty designing low-stakes writing assignments that students will peer-review in order to improve their learning in the course. “Instructors, as experts, have ways that they think and talk and they don’t actually explain those ways very well,” Woods says. “Students […] don’t really have those same structures and understanding of all of those norms. That’s why we call it Access to Practice – how do you give students access to how the discipline talks?” As many say, practice makes perfect.

Access to Practice also capitalizes on how the process of writing, reviewing, and revising improves students’ understanding of concepts and conventions. “It allows students to engage with knowledge in a way that helps them to tackle hard concepts,” Wilton says. He gives the example of his students being tasked with explaining a child’s genetic abnormality to their parents: “They have to write their answer in around 400 words, and that gets reviewed by two of their peers.” This communal learning exercise, which has both prompts and rubrics designed by faculty and project leadership together, has had a surprising finding: students seem to learn more by reviewing others than by being reviewed themselves.

In addition to the structured peer review exercises improving student learning and success, preliminary data shows that participation in the written exercises can increase feelings of disciplinary belonging in students. Faculty at UCSB have the opportunity to participate in the intervention, and the AtP leadership team has worked hard to share the impactfulness of their peer review exercises through publications (e.g., Woods et al., 2021) and presentations. “We’ve done lots of workshop presentations for instructors about how to create structured peer reviews,” Woods says. Outside of local UCSB meetings, Woods and Safronova presented at SABER West 2023, where their theme was Supporting Equitable Transitions in STEM Education.

Another one of WG2’s core projects is the Office Hours Project, led by Lalo Gonzalez, also an associate teaching professor at UCSB. Those within the project have worked hard to identify best practices associated with office hours and collect data through faculty surveys, student surveys, and an “office hours tracker” that documents the characteristics of students attending office hours. Characteristics include categories such as race, ethnicity, gender, first-generation status, and academic standing.

STEM instructors can investigate what is happening in their own classroom by collecting data and working with Office Hours leadership to interpret their findings. Wilton recalls that Gonzalez and a few others acted as mentors, helping instructors develop their education research skills by qualitatively coding survey responses and identifying themes. One trend they observed: first-generation and racially minoritized students were not (or rarely) attending office hours.

Wilton shared that to address these results, he and other instructors modified course syllabi to detail how their courses are designed to support students with learning, and how this support includes office hours. The syllabi also include an explanation of office hours norms, which, for Wilton and his colleagues, have shifted from one-on-one conversations in offices to open rooms with tables where students can work in groups. Finally, those who participate in the Office Hours Project normalize struggling and assure students that it’s a part of learning. Because office hours can seem scary and intimidating, these instructors have taken steps to make it a friendlier environment and lower potential barriers to attending.