Conference Title: Research Integration of Early Findings from Institution Transformation Projects

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The adoption and sustained use of research-based instructional strategies are more likely to occur when institutions create environments and structures to support faculty efforts to switch to them. The Division of Undergraduate Education has created several grant opportunities to support institutional transformation in STEM instruction by providing institutional grants under the WIDER program during 2012 and 2013 and thereafter in the IUSE: EHR program in the Institutional and Community Transformation track. (WIDER stood for Widening the Implementation and Demonstration of Evidence-Based Reforms. IUSE: EHR stands for Improving Undergraduate STEM Education in the EHR Directorate.) This conference will assemble Principal Investigators and co-Principal Investigators on projects supported by those two programs, as well as allied NSF programs under the NSF-wide IUSE framework, e.g. IUSE: GEOPATHS, IUSE: RED, and IUSE: POLAR. To save transportation costs, it will piggyback on a national meeting of NSF grant recipients in an array of the aforementioned programs past and present. This meeting is scheduled for the spring, 2016. Following NSF's 4-year focus on transforming institutions through grants in order to overcome intra-institutional barriers to adopting research-based instructional strategies, there is now a substantial number of institutions engaged in spreading the use of evidence-based teaching approaches and associated efforts in assessment and evaluation. Each institution is engaged in a partly unique set of activities to increase and support the spread of research-based practices. The structure of the conference is designed to determine how different approaches are working in different institutional contexts in order to identify those that are robust to institutional setting and those that are more idiosyncratic to the host institution. In a single institution there is a tendency for the research team in each institution to be heavily influenced by the idiosyncrasies of their institution. By connecting across institutions, teams will be able to develop a broader perspective on the effectiveness of various strategies that can be deployed in service of the main goal of spreading effective teaching practices across the instructional faculty. The primary purpose of this project is to conduct a research integration study of the preliminary findings of the projects supported by WIDER and IUSE: EHR. This integration study will provide a venue for research teams to compare results and share their understandings of what is working. The conference will lead to three outcomes: identification of successful strategies across a variety of institutional contexts, a synthesis of findings, and a network of sponsored projects for further follow-up. This conference will use the experience and expertise of the Principal Investigators through research integration by dialogue, using the approaches of a consensus conference and a consensus development panel through use of break-out sessions. A 7-step meta-ethnographic approach will be used.