Author(s):
Need: Much progress has been made in understanding how to foster undergraduate learning in STEM courses. Team-based approaches to improving undergraduate STEM have significant promise and are becoming more widespread. Yet establishing effective teams can be challenging, as team interactions can be complex, and not all teams are equally successful. Moreover, supporting teams can be resource intensive for change agents, funding agencies, and institutions. Thus, we need evidence-based guidance about how to create high-functioning teams and navigate emergent challenges.Guiding Questions: Our overarching research question focuses on understanding how different key aspects of instructional change team setup and functioning correlate with each other, and with team outcomes. We define an instructional change team as a group of three or people, including faculty and potentially other stakeholders (TAs, department chairs, etc.), who are working together to improve instruction in a specific course or set of courses. In our prior research, we built a model to identify and categorize different aspects of these teams that team members and project leaders view as important. Our current model includes 4 categories–team inputs (how teams are set up), team processes (how teams work together), emergent states (how teams think and feel about their work), and team outcomes–each encompassing 4-5 key constructs. This project has focused primarily on developing and validating a survey instrument that can be used to measure team functioning at scale and that can provide useful data for participating teams. We will use data from this new instrument to investigate our guiding questions.Outcomes: We have developed and statistically tested a new survey instrument: the Team Member Perceptions of Instructional Change Collaborations (TM-PICC) Survey. The final survey includes 43 Likert-scale items. Our statistical testing focused on the 5 team processes and 3 emergent states we identified in our earlier work. We found that we are able to measure team members’ perceptions of 4 team processes: strategic leadership, team member commitment, effective communication, and clear decision-making processes, and 3 emergent states: shared vision, psychological safety, and team cohesion. We determined that egalitarian power dynamics, while important, is better conceptualized as an emergent state than a team process. The survey also captures team inputs and team outcomes. We developed user-friendly reports that synthesize teams’ responses to the survey to support discussion and communication with local stakeholders.Broader Impacts: We have shared team-specific survey reports with all participants in our study. This included 202 team members across 34 teams at 9 institutions. We are currently working to make the validated survey instrument freely available and accessible online, including an automated way for teams to request that we distribute the survey and produce tailored reports. We will ultimately generate research-based recommendations about how to set up teams for success that can be used alone or in coordination with our survey instrument. Thus, this project will contribute to sustained improvements to undergraduate STEM instruction at higher education institutions across the U.S., which in turn can impact the experiences of thousands of current and future undergraduate STEM students.
Coauthors
Andrea Beach, Western Michigan University; Diana Sachmpazidi, University of Maryland; Amreen Nasim Thompson, FHI 360; Madison Fitzgerald-Russell, University of Iowa; Cynthia Luxford, Texas State University; Charles Henderson, Western Michigan University
