A Survey Tool to Assess Team Collaboration Around Instructional Change

Instructional change teams are increasingly common in efforts to improve undergraduate STEM instruction. Such teams include three or more members who may have different perspectives and backgrounds. When they are functioning well, teams can be very effective. Unfortunately, effective collaboration in teams is often challenging. In prior work, we developed a context-specific model that shows how teams are set up (inputs), how they work together (processes), how they feel and think about working together (emergent states), and team outcomes (outcomes) (Olmstead et al., 2019; Sachmpazidi et al., 2020). Based on this model we have developed and pilot tested a survey tool that uses responses from individual team members to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an instructional change team. In this talk, we will present the survey tool. We will show how the variables in our model translated into survey items, share the statistical analysis, and discuss the potential utility of this survey for teams, including the types of reports generated for teams who complete the survey. We will also discuss how educators, researchers, evaluators, and other change agents can access this survey for their own work, such as setting up teams, assessing or providing feedback to existing teams, and demonstrating effectiveness of teams for administrators and evaluators.