Understanding the Impacts of Departmental Action Teams on Sustainable Departmental Culture Change and on Undergraduate Student Experiences, Success, and Outcomes

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This project aims to serve the national interest by extending the analysis of a model of cultural and curricular improvements in STEM departments, with a particular focus on sustaining change. Efforts to transform undergraduate education often fail to have lasting impacts. These change efforts have been criticized by organizational change researchers for ignoring the influence of culture. The Departmental Action Team (DAT) model provides processes for effecting change in undergraduate education by supporting departmental teams through external facilitation. These teams include students, staff, and faculty who collaborate to improve their undergraduate program and develop their skills as change agents. This DAT model is guided by six Core Principles that describe an ideal departmental culture that supports long-term sustainable change. The principles include diversity and inclusion, involving students as partners, collaboration, data-driven decisions, and continuous change. The DAT project has supported 17 DATs across two campuses, which have initiated positive, sustained improvements in undergraduate education. More than half of these groups carried on after DAT project facilitation concluded. This project will examine the long-term impacts of these DATs and how departmental members sustain them. Additionally, the impacts on students in DAT departments will be investigated for potential correlations between cultural change that impacts students over the short term and later changes in student success measures. Studies of cultural change require a considerable time frame to research fully. This research is especially timely because it is now possible to study the long-term impacts on student success (eg., time to degree) of DATs that were formed in 2014. A mixed methods approach will be used for data collection and analysis. Data will include responses to the existing Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA) Survey, interviews with department members, artifacts from the DATs and their departments (e.g., meeting minutes, department policy statements), and institutional data. These data will be used to identify outcomes that are necessary for a department to develop a culture that supports sustained improvements in undergraduate education. Hypotheses about these outcomes comprise the third stage of the DAT theory of change. (The first two stages were refined as part of a previous study). Qualitative data analyses will allow testing and refinement of this stage. This work will contribute a detailed theory-based resource for enacting departmental change in undergraduate education. Three different approaches will be used to focus specifically on impacts DATs have on students. A student version of the DELTA Survey will be developed to collect students’ perceptions of departmental culture and change. Additionally, the Civitas Impact tool will be used to quantitatively test hypotheses about potential long-term impacts of DATs on student persistence. Lastly, by triangulating among data sources, correlations between DAT activities and changes that strongly impact and are sustained in departments will be examined. This mixed methods analysis is designed to relate short-term measures of student experiences with the specific cultural changes that are predictive of increased student success. Such information could be beneficial since it does not require long term student metrics such as time to degree. Overall, this work aims to contribute ways to measure cultural change among students in a department, examine the relationships between short-term change impacts and long-term student success, and yield better understanding of how change can be sustained and catalyzed long after a grant-funded initiative has ended. The NSF IUSE: EHR Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.