Presentations: Session VI

The involvement of undergraduate students in research is a proven and powerful pedagogy due to the many benefits gained in their cognitive, intellectual, professional, and personal growth realms. Integrating research skills and experiences throughout the undergraduate curriculum – via a comprehensive, course-embedded, and scaffolded strategy – is a powerful and more equitable way to engage students and expand student involvement. The curriculum allows for more equitable access to undergraduate research for students from all backgrounds as many students are unable to engage in mentored experiences during the semesters or the summer months. Importantly, scaffolding and connecting curricular elements of individual courses or entire programs serve as more equitable ways to ensure that all students are exposed to how knowledge is created across the disciplines.

The Council of Undergraduate Research (CUR), with Indiana University's Center for
Postsecondary Research, is working with 24 departments at 12 diverse institutions across the U.S. over a five-year period, to conduct fundamental research on student, faculty, departmental, and disciplinary influences on the process of integrating and scaffolding research into four-year undergraduate STEM curricula. To achieve a cohesive four-year curriculum that initiates students into a culture of inquiry and research in the discipline, the participating departments are using a backward-design approach to develop scaffolded, research-rich courses that guide students to greater independence and ownership of their learning. Providing all students with more equitable access to the benefits of undergraduate research is critically dependent on adapting not only curricula, but on faculty and student engagement and departmental cultures.

Our project is addressing two overarching questions: (1) What effect do student characteristics (e.g., pre-existing academic preparation) have on student-learning experiences and outcomes in a scaffolded, research-based curriculum? (2) How do different departmental approaches and distinct disciplinary cultures impact the integration of the components and outcomes of undergraduate research into the curriculum? A mixed-methods approach is being used, including surveys, focus groups with students and faculty, observations and interviews with faculty and consultants, annual progress reports, and in-depth site visits.

An emerging Theory of Change (TOC) model was developed and published in the latest ASCN "Transforming Institutions" volume. We will share our updated TOC model and insights from our 24 institutional teams that advance understanding of the transformational change process.

Student engagement in active learning has been shown to improve retention and understanding, but effecting sustained change in STEM instruction has proven challenging, particularly in large courses. In this presentation, we share intermediate results from an NSF-funded effort that aims to scale and sustain adoption of active learning in highly enrolled STEM courses at a large public university. This effort, which has been underway since 2018, builds on work in grassroots change in higher education (Kezar & Lester, 2011) and leverages course-based communities of transformation (CCTs) to change the culture of teaching and learning in STEM departments by targeting gateway course sequences. The rapid shift to online instruction brought on by COVID-19 provided an opportunity to study how established CCTs operated in this transition and what role they played in faculty teaching practices as courses moved online. This presentation focuses on CCTs in two departments: physics and mathematics. Using interviews of faculty involved in the targeted courses, as well as reflections written by the CCT leaders (also department faculty), we explore how teaching change efforts were impacted by the shift to online instruction and how CCTs affected instructors' teaching decisions during the transition. Findings discussed will include the role of CCTs in supporting teaching and during the pivot to online instruction, as well as how CCTs impacted the pedagogies employed in the targeted courses after the pivot. The mathematics CCT had been active for roughly 2 years at the time of the transition and the physics CCT for less than one year. Studying these two groups allows us to examine how the role of the CCT in rapid teaching change relates to the maturity of the local change effort.  

 Every change effort needs a solid foundation in order to achieve its desired impacts. We have found that project principles and a Theory of Change (TOC) provide such a foundation for the Departmental Action Team project, which brings together departmental faculty, staff, and students to enact consensus change in undergraduate education.

Project principles are grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge, but are abstract enough to be adapted to many contexts. We will give illustrative examples of how principles have been used to guide Departmental Action Teams and discuss how principles can apply to different change efforts.

A Theory of Change (TOC) presents an abstract, idealized sequence of intermediate outcomes needed to achieve a long-term outcome. The DAT TOC describes how to enact change equitably and sustainably in a departmental setting. Change efforts are enacted by people who are embedded within communities, so the DAT TOC directs attention to people's capacities, building relationships with the department, growing individuals' ability to make change, and functioning well as a team. By describing relationships between components, the DAT TOC presents a more nuanced way of describing change than most TOCs.

For those of you engaged in change efforts already in progress, we hope our principles and TOC draw your attention to aspects of change you may not have considered, but could address. For those of you who have already engaged in change efforts, we hope these tools can help you analyze the successes and challenges of your work. We believe project principles and TOCs can help the field construct a deeper understanding of how to enact change in higher education.

Increasingly, higher education STEM reform change initiatives seek to advance systems change, often through the proliferation of multi-institutional and multi-sector collaborative reform strategies. These initiatives believe that by working together, they can affect greater change than individual or organizational efforts. However, evaluation strategies and evaluation capacity are often not designed to address the complexity of these initiatives, suggesting the need for new and innovative approaches to measure success and guide ongoing improvement. Evaluators typically focus on intended project outcomes, but often overlook theories of change that include collaborative dynamics as a key determinant that influences how the project team functions, which then affects what change activities are pursued as well as what is accomplished. The purpose of this session is to explore the measurement of collaboration in two large, NSF-funded initiatives focused on inclusive teaching and broadening participation in STEM. The presenters will review the development and implementation of metrics and how they have engaged the projects in reviewing and exploring their respective collaborative dynamics. In addition, the presenters will explore a systems mapping strategy for how to connect and integrate collaborative dynamics in the examination of a project or initiative's reform strategies and associated outputs and outcomes.