This WIDER EAGER project is seeking to better understand how instructors think about evidence-based instructional practices and how introducing such practices across an organization influences their thinking. Despite significant investment and knowledge-building, many evidence-based instructional practices are not in wide use by a majority of STEM faculty members. This is at least in part due to the ways that faculty members think about evidence-based practices, including teaching, learning, and their responsibilities as instructors.
This project is implementing a high-profile, institution-level evidence-based instructional practice change effort. A study of STEM faculty models of evidence-based instructional practices is collecting data before and after the change effort to gage differences over time as a result of the change effort. Data are being collected using surveys and a new interview method based on Model Eliciting Activities. These methods are helping to discover the variables and leverage points, as well as the potential interactions between these points, that effect wide-scale change.
This project employs engineering management and organizational change literature to designing the intervention and associated research study. It is developing a new interview method which may become useful in future studies of STEM faculty change. This project includes university-level administrators and will demonstrate organizational change at three institutions, which may serve as a new model for other institutions seeking to change STEM faculty instructional practices.
