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

了解部门行动团队对可持续部门文化变革以及本科生经历、成功和成果的影响

• 批准号: 2021110
• 负责人: Joel Corbo
• 金额: $ 30万
• 依托单位: University of Colorado at Boulder
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-10-01 至 2023-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2021110&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Understanding; Impacts; Departmental; Action; Teams

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.

该项目旨在通过扩展对 STEM 部门文化和课程改进模型的分析来服务于国家利益，特别关注本科教育转型的努力往往无法产生持久影响。部门行动团队（DAT）模型提供了通过外部促进支持部门团队来实现本科教育变革的流程，这些团队包括学生、教职员工和教师，他们合作提高本科生的水平。编程和开发该 DAT 模型以六项核心原则为指导，描述了支持长期可持续变革的理想部门文化，这些原则包括多样性和包容性、学生作为合作伙伴、协作、数据驱动的决策和持续变革。 DAT 项目已支持两个校区的 17 个 DAT，其中一半以上在 DAT 项目促进结束后继续进行。豪沃尔此外，还将调查对 DAT 系学生的影响，以了解短期影响学生的文化变革与学生成功衡量标准的后续变化之间的潜在相关性。这项研究特别及时，因为现在可以研究 2014 年成立的 DAT 对学生成功（例如获得学位的时间）的长期影响。数据收集和分析将采用混合方法。将包括对现有部门教育的回应领导力转型评估 (DELTA) 调查、部门成员访谈、DAT 及其部门的工件（例如会议记录、部门政策声明）以及机构数据。这些数据将用于确定部门所需的结果。发展一种支持本科教育持续改进的文化。关于这些结果的假设构成了 DAT 变革理论的第三阶段（前两个阶段作为先前研究的一部分进行了改进）。这个的这项工作将为本科生教育中的部门变革提供详细的理论资源，将专门关注 DAT 对学生的影响。此外，Civitas 影响工具将用于强有力地定量测试有关 DAT 对学生坚持性的潜在长期影响的假设。最后，通过数据源之间的三角测量，DAT 活动与影响和变化之间的相关性。是这种混合方法分析旨在将学生体验的短期衡量与可预测学生成功率提高的特定文化变化联系起来，因为它不需要长期的学生指标。总体而言，这项工作旨在提供衡量院系学生文化变革的方法，研究短期变革影响与长期学生成功之间的关系，并更好地理解变革如何持续和发展。在国家科学基金会资助的计划结束后很长一段时间才得到催化。 IUSE：EHR 计划支持研究和开发项目，以提高所有学生的 STEM 教育的有效性。通过机构和社区转型轨道，该计划支持高等教育机构和学科社区的 STEM 教育转型和改进工作。该奖项。通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，NSF 的法定使命被认为值得支持。