Leveraging the AAU Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative to understand and advance the institutionalization of STEM teaching & learning reforms

Association Of American Universities, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This project will study the institutional transformation processes initiated through the Association of American Universities (AAU) Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative -- a comprehensive change initiative launched in 2011 with funding from the Helmsley Charitable Trust. This is an ambitious project, which seeks to increase the importance of undergraduate STEM education in the nation's top research universities by promoting the implementation of a more systemic view of educational reform. This earlier project initiated change within eight university participants that were selected from a larger pool of AAU applicants to receive seed grants of $500K from AAU. The current project is guided by AAU's "Framework for Systemic Change in Undergraduate STEM Teaching and Learning," developed from leading theories and research on institutional change. That Framework identifies a set of key institutional elements that need to be addressed in order to bring about sustainable change, emphasizing the separate roles of senior university administrators (the top-down component), individual faculty (the bottom-up component), sub academic units in the form of departments and colleges (a middle-out component), and the professional disciplines. The project will document the intricacies of reform within each of the eight universities, producing a set of eight case studies. The intellectual merit of the project lies in going beyond the initial phase of implementing the reforms to asking the questions about what factors at the institutional level facilitated the launch, acceptance, success, spread and impact of the reforms. Newer interview questions will be piggy-backed onto the existing time frames for the follow-up inquires in year 4 of the original AAU project's time frame (2016) and additional entities and individuals with the universities will be the focus of the newer investigations. Using the combined data, the PI team expects that newer information about factors important to reform, and the relative importance, priority, or sequence of the factors, to emerge. There is significant value in understanding the complex processes underlying progress at partner institutions in the Undergraduate STEM Education Initiative. Identifying cross-cutting trends (as opposed to institution-specific factors) would be especially valuable. The team also seeks to develop a generalizable, research-based snapshot of successful institutional reform.