Sustaining Undergraduate STEM Transformation And Improvement Networks through Change Agent Turnover

About This Grant

This project aims to serve the national interest by supporting departmental change teams in institutions of higher education who are working to improve their undergraduate mathematics programs. The goal of this IUSE Level 1, Track 1 Institutional and Community Transformation grant, Sustaining Undergraduate STEM Transformation And Improvement Networks through Change Agent Turnover (SUSTAIN-CAT), is to better understand how STEM educational change networks sustain themselves and their efforts when people leave or shift roles (i.e., change agent turnover; CAT). It is well-documented that U.S. mathematics achievement needs to be improved for most students. Improvement efforts depend on a core group of change agents to provide leadership and momentum for a change project. Peripheral individuals are also involved (department chairs, deans, other partners), whose positional power can positively or negatively impact project progress. One constant is that across a multi-year project, the people involved change. Thus, the primary research question guiding this project is: How do institutional and community transformation projects sustain their critical change efforts through personnel turnover, while also honoring and incorporating the strengths and interests of incoming change team members? A significant contribution of SUSTAIN-CAT is the focus on planning effectively for personnel turnover; such plans are rare among existing change efforts. SUSTAIN-CAT has three main goals: (1) Leverage existing data and expert feedback to identify processes, structures, relationships, and states that support the sustainability of change efforts beyond CAT. Analysis of secondary data from five existing, NSF-funded change projects (collectively representing 118 STEM education change teams) will inform and augment current change theories in STEM education, specifically by providing insight into the phenomenon of CAT. Further, experienced change agents will contribute to theory-building about strategies to sustain or expand change efforts through CAT, by participating in a modified Delphi process. Collectively, these analyses will result in the development of detailed vignettes of CAT. (2) Develop, pilot, and refine an interactive toolkit to support change agent teams in proactively planning for sustainability beyond CAT. The vignettes will be included in an interactive toolkit and accompanying workshops focused on supporting change agent teams through CAT. Change agent teams will pilot this toolkit and engage in a series of workshops to support their use of the toolkit. Results from this pilot stage will support revisions to the toolkit, which will then be shared broadly. (3) Understand how interactions with the toolkit influence processes, structures, relationships, and states of teams experiencing CAT. Collection and analysis of data from change agent teams piloting the toolkit will inform the development of theory about CAT. Findings related to toolkit implementation will be shared with both researcher and practitioner audiences through presentations at relevant conferences and manuscripts (both practical and theory-extending). Although change efforts are local, context-dependent, and individualized for particular goals, teams, and situations, all change teams inevitably encounter CAT; failing to accommodate CAT typically results in change efforts fizzling out. Change teams that proactively plan for accommodating CAT are much better positioned to weather the changes and even use the CAT to accelerate or broaden their change efforts. The NSF IUSE: EDU Program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. Through the Institutional and Community Transformation track, the program supports efforts to transform and improve STEM education across institutions of higher education and disciplinary communities. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.