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

两个主要的学术团体正在努力从根本上改变高等教育中科学、技术、工程和数学(STEM)课程的教学实践。以学科为基础的STEM教育研究人员倾向于开发和传播特定的教学材料或教学风格给个别教师。分析的单位通常是个别讲师。高等教育领域的研究人员倾向于专注于改变，或者更多地是研究学院或大学的文化或制度的变化。分析的单位通常是机构一级的。虽然这两种观点似乎是相辅相成的，而且更好的理解和理论将来自于结合，但这样的结合是罕见的。这个研究型社区发展项目的目标是将这两个社区的成员聚集在一起，以完善与本科生STEM教学相关的变革理论。这一目标将通过2007年夏季的一个规划讲习班来实现，届时4个私营部门主管和3个咨询委员会成员将举行会议，就体制变革理论方面的主要主题、挑战和研究进行讨论并达成共识。这些问题将成为2008年夏季一次更大的全国会议的主题，届时将有来自多个学科的约40名研究人员参加。尽管国家委员会、国家小组、大学管理人员、个人研究人员和其他许多人对改善本科STEM教学的重要性发表了强烈的言论，但关于有效STEM教学的知识生产与高等教育STEM教师的实际做法之间的差距越来越大。现有的变革理论似乎不能完全解释这种情况，也没有证明它们在找到解决方案方面特别成功。该项目将通过提供一个综合的跨学科框架来考虑现有工作和规划新的工作，从而改进理论。

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.