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部门的文化和现代改进模型的分析来服务国家利益，并特别着眼于维持变革。改变本科教育的努力通常不会产生持久的影响。组织变革研究人员忽略文化的影响至关重要。部门行动团队（DAT）模型通过通过外部设施为部门团队提供支持，提供了影响本科教育变化的流程。这些团队包括学生，教职员工和教职员工，他们合作改善了本科课程并发展自己的变革代理技能。该DAT模型由六个核心原则指导，这些原则描述了支持长期可持续变化的理想部门文化。这些原则包括多样性和包容性，使学生作为合作伙伴，协作，数据驱动的决策和持续变化。 DAT项目支持了两个校园中的17个DAT，这些校园已经开始了积极的，持续的本科教育。在DAT项目准备后，超过一半的小组进行了结束。该项目将研究这些DAT的长期影响以及部门成员如何维持它们。此外，将研究对DAT部门学生的影响，以研究在短期内影响学生的文化变革与随后的学生成功措施变化之间的潜在相关性。文化变革的研究需要考虑时间范围才能进行全面研究。这项研究尤其及时，因为现在可以研究2014年成立的学生成功的长期影响（例如，达到程度的时间）。将使用一种混合方法来收集和分析。数据将包括对现有部门教育和领导力转型评估（DELTA）调查的回应，对部门成员的访谈，DATS及其部门的工件（例如，会议记录，部门政策声明）和机构数据。这些数据将用于识别部门开发一种文化所必需的结果，以支持本科教育的持续改善。关于这些结果的假设完成了DAT变化理论的第三阶段。 （作为先前研究的一部分，将前两个阶段完善）。定性数据分析将允许对此阶段进行测试和完善。这项工作将贡献基于理论的详细资源，以实施本科教育的部门变革。将使用三种不同的方法专门针对DAT对学生的影响。将开发出学生版的学生版本，以收集学生对部门文化和变革的看法。此外，CIVITAS IMPACT工具将用于定量检验DAT对学生持久性潜在长期影响的假设。最后，通过在数据源之间进行三角调节，将检查DAT活动与在部门中受到强烈影响并维持的变化之间的相关性。这种混合方法分析旨在将学生体验的短期度量与预测学生成功增加的特定文化变化联系起来。此类信息可能是有益的，因为它不需要长期的学生指标，例如学位时间。总体而言，这项工作旨在为衡量部门学生之间的文化变革的方式做出贡献，研究短期变化影响与长期学生成功之间的关系，并对如何在赠款资助的倡议结束后很久就可以更好地了解如何维持变化和催化变化。 NSF IUSE：EHR计划支持研发项目，以提高所有学生STEM教育的有效性。通过机构和社区转型的轨道，该计划支持努力在高等教育和学科社区的机构中转变和改善STEM教育的努力。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛影响的评估来进行评估的审查标准。