Center for Science, Mathematics and Computer Education Research Scientist Rachel Funk and Director Wendy Smith have co-authored an article published in SN Social Sciences, a a journal by SpringerNature, in November 2022.
"The role of leadership in educational innovation: a comparison of two mathematics departments’ initiation, implementation, and sustainment of active learning" was written alongside SEMINAL grant colleagues Dr. Karina Uhing of the University of Nebraska at Omaha and Dr. Molly Williams of Murray State University. Uhing and Williams both earned their Ph.Ds. at UNL, in mathematics and educational studies, respectively.
Several studies have shown that the use of active learning strategies can help improve student success and persistence in STEM-related fields. Despite this, widespread adoption of active learning strategies is not yet a reality as institutional change can be difficult to enact. Accordingly, it is important to understand how departments in institutions of higher education can initiate and sustain meaningful change.
We use interview data collected from two institutions to examine how leaders at two universities contributed to the initiation, implementation, and sustainability of active learning in undergraduate calculus and precalculus courses. At each institution, we spoke to 27 stakeholders involved in changes (including administrators, department chairs, course coordinators, instructors, and students).
Our results show that the success of these changes rested on the ability of leaders to stimulate significant cultural shifts within the mathematics department. We use communities of transformation theory and the four-frame model of organization change in STEM departments in order to better understand how leaders enabled such cultural shifts. Our study highlights actions leaders may take to support efforts at improving education by normalizing the use of active learning strategies and provides potential reasons for the efficacy of such actions. These results underscore the importance of establishing flexible, distributed leadership models that attend to the cultural and operational norms of a department. Such results may inform leaders at other institutions looking to improve education in their STEM departments.
Read the full article at: https://rdcu.be/c0sAV