Facilitating Change in Higher Education: A Multidisciplinary Effort to Bridge the Individual Actor and System Perspectives

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Two major scholarly communities are working to bring fundamental changes to the teaching practices used in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) courses in higher education. Disciplinary-based STEM educational researchers tend to focus on developing and disseminating specific instructional materials or pedagogical styles to individual instructors. The unit of analysis is typically the individual instructor. Researchers in the field of higher education tend to focus on changing, or, more often, studying changes in the culture or systems of colleges or universities. The unit of analysis is typically at the institutional level. Although it would appear that these two perspectives are complementary and that better understanding and theory would result from a combination, such combination is rare. The goal of this research community development project is to bring members of these two communities together to improve change theories related to undergraduate STEM instruction. This goal will be accomplished through a planning workshop during the summer of 2007 where the 4 PIs and 3 advisory committee members will meet to discuss and arrive at consensus on the major themes, challenges, and research to be conducted in theories of institutional change. These issues will be the topic of a larger national conference during the summer of 2008, which will draw approximately 40 researchers from a broad array of disciplines. In spite of the strong rhetoric from national commissions, state panels, university administrators, individual researchers, and many others about the importance of improving undergraduate STEM instruction, there is an ever-widening gap between knowledge production about effective STEM instruction and the actual practices of tertiary-level STEM instructors. Existing change theories do not appear to fully explain this situation nor have they proven particularly successful in finding solutions. This project will lead to improved theory by providing a comprehensive interdisciplinary framework from which to consider existing work and to plan new work.