Oral Presentations: Session F

There have been many change initiatives to improve undergraduate education, but despite investment of significant resources, implemented changes do not always last. Researchers in organizational change suggest that when changes are not supported by the existing organizational culture or the culture is not modified to support the changes, it is unlikely they will be sustained (Kezar, 2013; Schein, 2010). Thus, the Departmental Action Team (DAT) project simultaneously attends to departmental culture while improving undergraduate education, so that improvements are more likely to be sustained.
Traditionally, interviews and other qualitative methods have been used to characterize culture, but these methods require extensive resources. To characterize a department's culture around undergraduate education, we developed the DELTA survey, which consists of three components. The first component draws from a validated instrument, the Survey of Climate for Instructional Improvement (Walter, Beach, Henderson, & Williams, 2015). While the SCII focuses on climate, it also provides insight on instructional culture. The second component asks questions concerning the social networks in a department regarding undergraduate education. The types of interactions people have and perceptions of influence and power contribute to a department's culture, and social network analysis allows us to track these interactions. The final component investigates the department's alignment with the DAT project's six core principles. The core principles have been drawn from literature on positive culture in higher education, and we believe that an ideal departmental culture operates in accordance with these principles.
The DELTA is intended to be used for characterizing a department's culture around undergraduate education so that DAT work can be informed by the existing culture of the department and so changes to the culture can be tracked over time. The DELTA has been distributed in several departments across multiple disciplines at two large universities, and our findings will be described.

We have created the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate STEM Education (CAUSE) to implement evidence-based teaching in STEM departments at Univeristy of Washington. The goal of CAUSE is to transform the UW's undergraduate teaching mission, by taking best practices from the change and faculty development literature to inform the design of our efforts. The core of the program is a 2-year Exploration and Implementation experience that helps participants learn evidence-based teaching methods. The project emphasizes 1) incremental and continued change in teaching practice, 2) providing training and support for a critical mass of faculty in units across STEM, 3) producing a broad spectrum of data on change in faculty practice and student outcomes, 4) providing "graduates" with opportunities for professional advancement as CAUSE Fellows and 5) builds enduring, cross-disciplinary communities of practice.
CAUSE is comprised of cohorts of teams of three faculty from seven STEM departments. Each year a new cohort of three faculty is recruited from the same departments. CAUSE is collecting seven types of data, each of which will play a role in characterizing faculty practice and student performance: 1) quantifying classroom practice by coding videos of four random classes from each CAUSE participant using the PORTAAL rubric, 2) using Bloom's taxonomy and IRT to measure the cognitive challenge level of exams, 3) probing achievement gaps in exam performance based on gender, ethnicity, or family income, 4) documenting fail rates, retention and graduation rates across student demographics 5) assessing the climate for instructional change at the department level, 6) monitoring changes in faculty beliefs about teaching and 7) measuring student perception of the learning environment. End of quarter reports are generated as feedback for the CAUSE participants to help them monitor change in classroom practices and the impact those changes have on student learning. Results will be presented.

Students learn better when they are actively engaged in constructing knowledge, but teaching approaches that foster student engagement are far from widespread in undergraduate STEM classrooms. To remedy this, the Biological Sciences Program at the University of Maryland is using the Characteristics of Dissemination Success (CODS) model as a theoretical framework for changing the culture of teaching and learning. This framework acknowledges the complex interplay between the institutional context, student attitudes, and faculty beliefs and teaching practices. Approximately 20 faculty members within the first four courses in the biological sciences curriculum have been meeting regularly since January 2017 as a community of practice, with the goals of (1) developing progressive learning activities that employ evidence-based, student-centered teaching approaches, (2) gathering evidence for the effectiveness of these approaches, and (3) implementing strategies that help students recognize evidence of their learning, to increase student buy-in for approaches that require greater effort and engagement. We are using quantitative and qualitative methods to understand how student, faculty, and institutional characteristics interact to influence decisions about teaching. Our data indicate that student attitudes and academic backgrounds are heterogeneous, creating instructional challenges in the classroom. In particular, we identified clusters of introductory biology students who had generally negative attitudes towards learning biology and low receptivity to active learning. A pre/post survey of faculty participants (N=16) showed that faculty could be clustered into two groups based on their reported use of student-centered approaches at the beginning of the project, but 18 months later the two clusters no longer differed in teaching practices. Faculty members' teaching self-efficacy also increased significantly, with the initially less-confident individuals showing the largest gains. The CODS framework is widely adaptable to other institutional contexts and provides insight into effective strategies for fostering wider adoption of student-centered teaching approaches.