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

在美国国家科学基金会创新与组织变革项目的支持下，本研究主要关注教育创新的传播是否以及如何在化学系及其机构中发生。它考察了两个相互喜欢的化学联盟（ChemLinks和ModularChem）的结果，这些联盟的参与教师代表了广泛的两年制和四年制院校。通过研讨会传播和原始参与者的非正式“网络”，采用联盟教材和方法的教师数量继续增长，参与机构的数量现在约为100家。本分析的中心目的是阐明促使或限制高等科学教育变革的条件，并评估化学联盟战略和NSF项目中隐含的变革理论的有效性，这些变革理论是对这些变革的回应。该项目的结果将有助于我们了解学生学习、教师课堂实践、部门绩效和机构对教育改进的支持，哪些能够促进和维持改进，哪些不能。

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.