Examining Design Knowledge And Practice Among STEM Faculty-Designers Using Visual Lesson Blueprints

Improving the design of undergraduate gateway STEM courses is a high priority, particularly courses with large enrollment and high failure rates. Effective course design has been noted as a key strategy for improving higher education teaching. This has resulted in the need for faculty to enact the role of a faculty-designer to redesign courses. This embedded qualitative case study investigated how faculty design knowledge influences design practice. Three faculty participated in a 6-hour course modeling workshop and used the Learning Environment Modeling (LEM) toolkit to generate 13 visual lesson blueprints while engaging in design discussions and interviews. A two-phased, hybrid inductive-deductive analysis approach was used for data collection, data preparation, and data analysis. Results discuss: (1) “design patterns of practice” emergent among activity sequences and lesson sequences in visual blueprints; (2) contextual factors that drive faculty design decisions in STEM lesson design; and (3) key influencers to faculty design knowledge and design practice. Findings offer a deeper understanding of design knowledge that guides STEM faculty as they make design decisions. The study offers implications to qualitative visual research methods as well as to university centers for teaching and learning as key stakeholders in supporting faculty as designers.