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Supplemental Instructions (SIs) were introduced into the San Francisco State University College of Science & Engineering curriculum in 1999. The goal was to improve student performance and retention and to decrease the time to degree in STEM majors. While for the most part we followed the structure and activities as developed by the International Center for Supplemental Instruction at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, we discovered several variations that significantly improved our outcomes. First and foremost, we created SI courses that require attendance, which results in higher students’ performance outcomes compared to drop-in options. Second, at SFSU the SI courses are led by pairs of undergraduate student facilitators (who are all STEM majors) trained in active learning strategies. Each year, more than half of our facilitators return to teach for another year. Thus, each section has a returning “experienced” facilitator who works with a new “novice” facilitator. Third, the SI courses were created with a distinct course prefix and listed as courses that generate revenue and make data access available for comparison studies. Results are presented that compare SI impact by gender and with groups underrepresented in STEM disciplines.

Louisiana State University (LSU)’s Office of Strategic Initiatives (OSI) is an award-winning office devoted to developing effective, educational approaches that incorporate guidance and exploration, increase students’ academic standing, and support measures to improve the institution’s diversity, predominantly in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments. Through the incorporation of three main factors, Mentoring, Education, and Research, OSI has developed a holistic development model that offers students strategies to overcome those factors that affect their persistence in STEM. OSI houses several programs with a diverse population of students ranging from the high school to doctoral levels. Although varied in student population, these programs unite under the holistic development model to provide support and opportunities to students at each critical educational juncture. OSI’s holistic approach has successfully supported over 135 high school, 560 undergraduate, and 100 graduate students. Of the 560 undergraduate students served, 51% were underrepresented minorities and 55% were women. The undergraduate initiatives have garnered 445 bachelor’s degrees, with 395 degrees from STEM disciplines, and an impressive overall graduation rate ranging from 64% to 84%. Through all of the remarkable work performed in OSI, the greatest accomplishment has been the capacity to offer students from mixed backgrounds tools and strategies to thrive at any point in their academic career.

Technology for training military teams has evolved through a convergence of advances in simulation technology for individual and collective training, methods for analyzing teamwork and designing training solutions, and intelligent tutoring technologies that adapt training to the student, to accelerate learning. A number of factors have slowed this evolution toward intelligent team tutoring systems (ITTS), including the challenges of processing communications data, which are the currency of teamwork, and the paucity of automated and generalizable measures of team work. Several systems fulfill a subset of the features required of an ITTS, namely the use of team training objectives, teamwork models, measures of teamwork, diagnostic capability, instructional strategies, and adaptation of training to team needs. We describe these systems: the Advanced Embedded Training System (AETS), Synthetic Cognition for Operational Team Training (SCOTT), the AWO Trainer, the Benchmarked Experiential System for Training (BEST), and the Cross-Platform Mission Visualization Tool. We close this chapter with recommendations for future research.

This chapter explores the ways in which academic educators’ experience of collaborative inquiry-based learning (IBL) can illuminate student behaviours, particularly in relation to assessment and the affective domain. The facilitator of this IBL, in the setting of academic staff development in UK Higher Education, uses a reflective storytelling style to detail the learning of an annual cohort of staff at a university in the north west of the United Kingdom. Six separate academic staff cohorts enroled in a unit, as part of a Master of Arts in Academic Practice, to undertake this experiential, humanist way of learning, working with all the principles of collaborative inquiry. The chapter explores the ways in which the participants’ self-reported affective responses altered over the course of the unit, particularly in relation to the assessment. Participant reflections are integrated with pedagogic literature and extracts from the facilitator’s contemporaneous notes, assessor’s feedback and other material, detailing the ways in which the freedom of an IBL episode moves to anxiety associated with assessment, which can build as the assessment point nears. Reflections on group constitution, cohort characteristics and the role of the facilitator are considered in relation to the notion of ‘success’ of IBL episodes. This is interrogated particularly in relation to academic staff responses to the experience of the emotions of IBL, and how this may affect their own practice in designing teaching and learning experiences for students in Higher Education.

This chapter describes the Initiative for Maximizing Student Diversity (IMSD), a National Institutes of Health-funded research training program at North Carolina State University (NCSU). IMSD is designed to increase the number and success of student Scholars from groups underrepresented in the biomedical and behavioral sciences. The NCSU-IMSD program provides financial support for both undergraduate and graduate students and utilizes a holistic approach that engages students in both academic and nonacademic professional development activities. Undergraduate IMSD Scholars are placed in research labs with faculty and graduate mentors during the entire academic year as well as the summer, and seeks to create a sense of community across cohorts. Unlike similar programs at other research-extensive universities, NCSU-IMSD is housed in the graduate school and serves students across multiple departments and colleges. This location provides greater opportunities for interdisciplinary interaction between student Scholars and is a model that enhances institutional commitments to diversity in the research sciences. This chapter describes these key program dimensions and provides guidelines for doctoral institutions seeking to enhance the experiences of underrepresented undergraduate and graduate students in the biomedical and behavioral sciences.