Change as a Scholarly Act

Posted: Aug 30 2017 by

Judith Ramaley
Portland State University

Judith Ramaley, Portland State University The Accelerating Systemic Change in STEM Undergraduate Education (ASCN) Network was set up to accelerate change at program and institution levels, and to improve STEM education nationally. Underlying all of these efforts is the question of how to think about change itself and how to launch, expand, and then sustain and adapt a large-scale change effort in the context of our college and university environments. Much of the literature on change has been developed through the study of change efforts in business settings (e.g., Kotter 1996, Heifetz and Linsky 2002). While approaches like these offer a number of useful insights into the nature of change itself and effective ways to think about and lead a change effort, they are based on the culture, approaches to leadership, and working relationships that characterize a business environment. More

Writing a proposal? Here are some great resources from ASCN!

Posted: Dec 19 2016 by

Stephanie Chasteen
University of Colorado at Boulder

Stephanie Chasteen

For many of us, it's proposal writing season. If you are submitting an NSF-IUSE proposal, there are increasing expectations that the proposal will include a theory of change for how the project aims to achieve its outcomes, and a well-developed evaluation plan for assessing progress toward those outcomes. As an evaluator, I am often asked to help people flesh out these objectives and metrics, and I have found several of the resources on the ASCN site very useful. I was lucky enough to be helping out with the ASCN project when these resources came in, and acted as a temporary librarian to create the list of resources on the site, and so am quite familiar with the breadth of resources. This blog post is to point you toward some of my favorites that have been useful when writing a proposal aimed at institutional change. More

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