Collaborative Research: Mapping Change in Higher Education - Social Networks and STEM Reforms

This is a collaborative proposal from three institutions that have been implementing institutional transformation grants for at least three years. (These are grants to institutions that have promised to embark on a process of increasing the use of evidence-based teaching methods. The grants typically support professional development activities and incentives for STEM faculty to change their teaching strategies. In addition, the grant activities are conducted in the context of one or more theories about how systemic change occurs.) Two of these grants were from the earlier WIDER Program (Widening the Implementation and Demonstration of Evidence-based Reforms) and one was from the Institutional Transformation track of the current IUSE: EHR Program. This proposal includes one PI from each of these earlier grants, with the goal of finding the transformation strategies that are effective at these institutions, which differ in the level of faculty participation in local and national networks focused on improved STEM teaching, the institutional presence of scholars who study how students learn STEM, and the institutional incentives available to promote increased use of evidence-based teaching practices. The research will examine interaction effects between teaching networks and research networks, particularly intra-institutional research networks. This project will broaden our knowledge of effective institutional change models and help efforts in other institutions to encourage evidence-based teaching.

The research conducted in this project focuses on the cooperative and joint activities of the STEM faculties. It will examine how members of the STEM faculties associate with each other professionally in their teaching and their research, both within the institution and nationally. Among other things, it will examine how participation in national teaching networks focused on specific teaching methods of proven value increases the participant?s influence on institutional colleagues with whom they network. The impact of stronger networks will be examined though the networks? impact on individual faculty choices of teaching methods and on basic measures of student success in lower division STEM courses. The project is constructed around the application of social network analysis and use of the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM, which has proven relatively easy to implement.