Collaborative Research: Characterizing the emerging field of departmental change and empowering an inclusive network of practitioners

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This project aims to serve the national interest by advancing understanding of the central role that departments in higher education institutions play in the transformation of undergraduate education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Based on team-based models of institutional change, this IUSE: EDU Track 2 - Institutional and Community Transformation Level 1 project investigates successful departmental change efforts to identify effective strategies and elements that support institutionalization and sustainability. This research and development effort is being conducted by STEM practitioners and researchers from the National-Louis University, the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado State University, and Western Michigan University. Establishing a structured network of STEM instructors, institutional administrators, staff, and education researchers, the project tests the hypothesis that prior efforts that focused on individual practitioners, researchers, or courses were largely ineffective. The project team posits that team-based change models and actions that focus on the department as the engine of change have the potential to establish and sustain the transformation of teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM education. The project team proposes a two-pronged project: (1) A landscape study focusing on undergraduate STEM education departmental change projects that investigates their methods for supporting change and (2) catalyzing an inclusive community network for sharing findings and recommended practices. The goals of the project are to describe (1) the structures, approaches, and theoretical frameworks of STEM departmental change projects and (2) the impacts of networking departmental change agents. The complex and mixed methods research and development project is guided by a systems approach that (a) is informed by an organizational learning framework and that (B) integrates a critical theory and equity/social justice approach to better advance knowledge on departmental transformation across the many types of student populations and institutions of higher education that populate the post-secondary education enterprise of the Nation. Framed by a set of research questions, the team examines a corpus of data and information that consist of a systematic review of the literature/existing resources, and an archive depicting departmental change efforts, interviews with key project leaders, and surveys/interviews/observation of participants. Data analyses will be guided by deductive and inductive cross-case approaches to analyzing qualitative data and text-based information resulting in a partially ordered meta-matrix and a stacking cases approach to support clustering and condensing cases. The project’s theory of change and systems approach are well-aligned with the phenomena under study and the complexity of the problem. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the project 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.