ABSTRACT
Over the past 35 years, student-centered pedagogies have become more and more prevalent at both the secondary and postsecondary levels. This chapter describes the origin and history of POGIL and the context in which POGIL pedagogy arose. It focuses on the specific context for the development of the pedagogic approach that came to be known as POGIL. During the 1980s and 1990s, numerous student-centered instructional reforms were developed and implemented across science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. There continued to be strong interest within the undergraduate chemistry community, but faculty members from other STEM disciplines had attended workshops and become interested in implementing POGIL in their classrooms. In 2013, The POGIL Project was selected as one of four large-scale successful STEM reform networks included in an NSF project on studying how these types of organizations are designed to spread innovations among participants and the campuses on which they are employed.
