The Center for Instructional Excellence leads SEISMIC efforts at Purdue in a number of ways.

Local principal investigator -Chantal Levesque-Bristol, CIE executive director, serves as the local principal investigator on the SEISMIC collaboration.

Working Groups  – There are four SEISMIC working groups that promote collaborative work among institutions in “themes” that study specific areas that contribute to equity and inclusivity: (1) Measurement, (2) Experiments, (3) Implementing Change, and (4) Constructs. For more information on the working groups, check out the SEISMIC website.Several of the current SEISMIC Purdue projects within the working groups being explored at Purdue include:

• Exploring Demographic Effects in Introductory STEM Courses is a Measurement project co-lead by Chantal Levesque-Bristol, CIE executive director. The project is conducting parallel data analyses across the 10 SEISMIC institutions in different introductory STEM courses. It seeks to explore the components of student identity – those we can capture, those we cannot, and how they interact with the learning environments typical to intro STEM courses.  
• Test Anxiety is a project in the Experiments working group and includes Purdue’s Allison Godwin, associate professor of engineering education and chemical engineering. This cross-institutional group of instructors is working to test the hypothesis that test anxiety explains part of the performance gap between under-represented students in introductory STEM courses and their well-represented counterparts.

Reading groups – CIE, in cooperation with the Purdue Teaching Academy, have featured some selections from the SEISMIC Reading Group in semester-long reading groups. They include Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People, Relationship-Rich Education: How Human Connections Drive Success in College, and Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Contact Dan Guberman, CIE senior instructional developer, about the next PWL reading group.