Impact

Berkeley Discovery has driven extensive curricular innovation across campus. With initiatives taking root in Integrative Biology, Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy, Public Health/Social Welfare/Education, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and the first year Reading and Composition and Foreign Language learning curriculum, Discovery’s interventions and amplifications have amounted to a sizable renovation of classes across campus. 

Our Impact to Date

The Discovery Initiative has accomplished much since its late 2020, early-pandemic launch, including these three highlights.

1. The Departmental Innovation Programs “Trailblazer” teams’ interventions have reached 9,662 students across six of Berkeley’s colleges and schools. And we expect it to continue to reach 3,542 annually moving forward.
2. Students taking part in Trailblazer programming and courses showed higher GPAs and also a greater sense of belonging than students in the comparison group, based on analysis conducted for the WSCUC accreditation report.
3. Significant strides have been made to ensure the sustainability of the Discovery Initiative.  We have expanded beyond the Trailblazer pilots to further install Discovery aims in the Berkeley undergraduate educational experience. These expansions include launching the Discovery Opportunities Database (currently used by 30% of Berkeley’s undergrads) and the Yardi Scholarship Program (a scaffolded educational experience that spans a Discovery journey course sequence of Berkeley Connect - Changemaker - Capstone).  In Spring 2025 we are launching a Research Discovery Hub in collaboration with the Kavli Energy NanoScience Institute (ENSI).

Documenting the Discovery Departmental Innovation Program (“Discovery Trailblazers”)

Launched in 2020 through a generous gift from the Chernin family, the Berkeley Discovery Departmental Innovation Award Program provided funding and guidance to departments for a multi-year process of refining their vision and implementation plan for Discovery at scale. This ambitious effort to give faculty the space to innovate their department’s curricular and co-curricular offerings selected a cohort of six teams - coined “Discovery Trailblazers - in May 2021. Teams received multi-year awards and contributed to a learning community to share best practices and replicable models for Discovery across campus. 

Our Initiative takes great pains to record the best practices of our outstanding innovators, making all manner of documentation to ensure that what they’ve built will live on and continue to transform the undergraduate educational experience here at Berkeley. We also strive to amplify not simply the classroom activities but the overall program structure and model for support so that our work might reach beyond Berkeley campus into sustainable transformations of undergraduate education around the world. Below, find detailed outlines of how each of our Trailblazers made strides towards this Initiative wide goal.