Measuring and Modeling Cultural Change in Higher Education
Changes in the institutional culture of Institutions of Higher Education (IHEs), particularly in their relationship to individual instructor beliefs and classroom practices, are a primary concern to the MSP community. Culture has not been adequately conceptualized and integrated into evaluations of STEM education, yet it is consistently cited as a reason why an intervention fails or succeeds. Research in cognitive anthropology and organizational behavior has shown that complex organizations like IHEs do not have homogenous cultures that uniformly influence all group members, but instead are characterized by cultural norms that are selectively interpreted and internalized by individuals. These cultural norms are in turn generated and shaped by the institutional context of IHE colleges and departments. As a result, evaluations attempting to measure and model cultural change need to conceptualize culture as operative at both the collective and individual levels, and to capture the dynamic relationship among the institutional context, cultural norms, and individual behaviors.
Interventions that are focused on changing individual instructor beliefs and practices, in particular, must be attentive to these dynamics and their influence on individual sensemaking, whereby institutional actors "make sense" of policy directives and decide to accept, reject, or adapt them into their existing practices and belief systems (Gamoran et al, 2003; Anderson & Helms, 2001). Researchers in education reform and organizational behavior are increasingly drawing on cognitive frameworks to explain institutional inertia and individual reactions to change initiatives. Of particular interest is schema theory, which states that new information and experiences are mediated through an individual's unconscious mental structures, which selectively frame and connect new ideas in terms of what is already encoded in memory (Schank & Abelson, 1977; Rumelhart, 1980). This paper describes the evaluation of professional development workshops for STEM faculty at a comprehensive university as part of the System-Wide Change for All Learners (SCALE) comprehensive MSP. The paper employs cultural model theory from cognitive anthropology to address these issues.
