Changing Undergraduate Chemistry: The Process of Change in Faculty, Departments and Institutions

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With support from the National Science Foundation's Innovation and Organizational Change Program, this research focuses on whether and how the diffusion of educational innovation can occur in chemistry departments and their institutions. It examines the results of two inter-liked chemistry consortia (ChemLinks and ModularChem) whose participating faculty represent a wide array of two-year and four-year institutions. The number of faculty adapting the consortia's teaching materials and methods continues to grow via workshop dissemination and informal "networking' by the original participants, and the number of participating institutions is now approximately one hundred. The central purposes of this analysis are to clarify the conditions that enable or limit change in higher education in the sciences, and to evaluate the efficacy of the theories of change implicit in the chemistry consortia's strategies and in the NSF programs to which they are a response. The results of this project will aid in our understanding of what does, and does not, promote and sustain improvement is student learning, faculty classroom practice, departmental performance and institutional support for improvements in education.