TRESTLE

The Transforming Education, Supporting Teaching and Learning Excellence (TRESTLE) is a 7-institution NSF-funded project to support improvements in undergraduate STEM education through (1) supporting course design projects, (2) enhancing educational expertise in departments, and (3) building communities within and across campuses to enhance the impact of local experts.

PROJECT PRODUCTS and PUBLICATIONS

Awards and Scholars communities are now completed for the project!Some valuable products from the TRESTLE project are below.

Handbook on embedded expert models of educational transformation

Are you involved in a course transformation initiative like TRESTLE? has advice on many aspects of aprogram like TRESTLE, based on its predecessor, the Science Education Initiative. The handbook is aimed at initiative organizers, individual departments, and embedded experts supporting individual courses.The full book is free and online at

SEI-handbook-cover

Websites and reports

  2. Curricular alignment informational page and handout.
  3. Course Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) page.
  4. Position paper on curricular alignment
  5. White paper on course-based undergraduate research experiences

​Publications about the project

  1. , (Journal article; Huber and Hutching, Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning, 2021).
  2. (Book chapter; Chasteen and Sherman, 2020).
  3. (Book chapter;Greenhoot et al., 2020)
  4. (poster; Chasteen et al., 2021)
  5. (talk; Chasteen et al., 2020)
  6. (article; Chasteen, 2019).
  7. TRESTLE faculty scholars groups: Spreading knowledge and generating community (poster; Ciancanelli et al., 2017)

Our funded awards page includes

  1. Graduate TA survey about teaching needs in EBIO
  2. Inclusivity exercises for students in engineering
  3. Non-majors physics lab course goals, experiments, exit ticket, TA reflection sheet.
  4. Environmental Studies course with revamped activities, goals and assessments.
  5. Case studies in integrative physiology
  6. Learning goals for non-majors' statistics in mathematics

Our learning communities page includes

  1. Facilitator guidelines and reflections for multiple faculty learning communities.
  2. Assessments (drafts and reflections across disciplines)
  3. Curricular alignmentreport and position paper
  4. Metacognition activities
  5. Group activities developed
  6. Learning goals for atmospheric science

CU TRESTLE Activities: [Now completed]

  1. TRESTLE Awards:
    • TRESTLE Course Transformation Awards ($10,000).
    • TRESTLE mini seed grants:Grants up to $1000 to support course transformation work.
  2. TRESTLE Scholar Program: One semester facilitated faculty collaboration to incorporate evidence based practices.
  3. ShInDiG (Shared Innovations Discussion Group): Informal discussion group to share information and feedback on effective teaching strategies. Aimed at practitioners, not researchers.
  4. Educational advisors program: As-needed, a la carte consultations

Join our email list

We have a low-traffic list (~2 announcements/month) of upcoming discussions, proposal opportunities, and meetings.

About our project

TRESTLE is a 7-institution, NSF-funded project to improve undergraduate STEM education. Our objective is to test a model of educational transformation which builds on the (at CU and UBC). Our model is derived from research on institutional change and quality improvement, and builds on a course transformation initiative (the Science Education Initiative, or SEI) that has been successful at two of the partner institutions. The core of the approach involves supporting "embedded expertise" within departments, centered on course transformation, to catalyze changes in teaching practices and culture. In this model, STEM education “embedded experts” collaborate with department faculty to guide and support the implementation of discipline-based educational practices in STEM courses.

The SEI was very resource intensive, using many dedicated postdoctoral scholars as the primary change agents. In the current project we test an extension of this model that involves using a smaller infusion of resources, by including multiple types of change agents (postdoctoral fellows, faculty, and groups of faculty), and developing communities of scholars within and across departments, and across institutions. Such a model has already been pilot tested with preliminary evidence of success at the University of Kansas (KU).

In the TRESTLE project, a network of seven research universities, led by KU, is implementingand evaluatingadaptations of this model on their own campuses. The network itself serves two general functions: 1) to build a community for intellectual exchange and collaboration on evidence-based teaching as a key component of the intervention itself, and 2) to permit a test of whether the intervention model can be localized and implemented in different institutional cultures to propagate widespread STEM reform.

The results can be used by other institutions seeking to make similar changes, in order to improve learning and educational outcomes for both STEM students and non-STEM students. Our findings will provide a wealth of new data to further our understanding of how to create scalable change on an institutional level, deepening the return on investment in STEM education reform.

More about TRESTLE

Who is TRESTLE?

TRESTLE is a project of the Center for STEM Learning (CSL), and was developed as part of a multi-institution consortium (the) interested in improving teaching and learning at their respective campuses, with theas one strong model for how this might be accomplished. TRESTLE is generously funded through the National Science Foundation (DUE 1525331).Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

University of Colorado PI:

  • Stephanie Chasteen (Center for STEM Learning and Science Education Initiative)

Cross-institutional Network

  • Project lead: Andrea Greenhoot (University of Kansas)
  • Other project partners: Mark Mort (KU), Caroline Bennett (KU), George Rehrey (IU-Bloomington), Marco Molinari (UC Davis), Chris Pagliarulo (UC Davis), JoAnn Browning (UT San Antonio), Warren Code (UBC), Gulnur Biriol (UBC), Brian Frank (Queens U.)

University of Colorado Advisory Board:

  • Noah Finkelstein (Physics), Anne-Barrie Hunter (Center for STEM Learning), Amy Palmer (Chemistry), Nichole Barger (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology), Valerie Otero (School of Education)