Culture, Cognition, and Evaluation of STEM Higher Education Reform (CCHER)
The Culture, Cognition and Evaluation of STEM Higher Education Reform (CCHER) Project is a mixed-methods longitudinal study designed to examine and describe teaching practices in Institutions of Higher Education (IHE) in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines. This is important because widespread investments in altering instruction in IHEs from a singular reliance on didactic lectures (i.e., the proverbial sage on the stage) to an inquiry-based approach grounded in the learning sciences have been slow to bear fruit. Research on reform implementation in K-12 schools, public health and the diffusion of innovations all point to the need to first develop a systematic understanding of a population prior to attempting behavioral change interventions. Without such a nuanced understanding of instructional practices, singular and over-simplified explanations of the slow rate of change such as recalcitrant faculty or the lack of incentives do not provide change agents with adequate information for program design and implementation.
Yet the field lacks the conceptual and methodological tools to adequately explore (a) complexities of the teaching practice itself, and (b) the multi-faceted factors that influence teaching practice (i.e., psychological, cultural and contextual factors). This study’s primary aim is to develop an approach that examines practice in complex organizations while taking into account these factors that influence teaching. Our approach conceptually and methodologically integrates cognition, culture, context and practice into a unified field of activity, as opposed to viewing each factor as an isolated phenomenon. Such a complex dynamic calls for a diverse set of data (i.e., survey, interview, and observations) and analytic techniques (e.g., thematic analysis, multi-dimensional scaling, hierarchical linear modeling), and this study takes small portions of the cognition-culture-context-practice dynamic and produces rich descriptive accounts of teaching. These multi-dimensional accounts can be used by policymakers, faculty developers and other change agents to improve their understanding of the factors that support or inhibit particular pedagogical practices, and by program evaluators and administrators to develop situation analyses or baseline accounts of teaching practice and its local determinants.
CCHER is housed within the Wisconsin Center for Education Research at the School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison. Copyright ©2009, The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
The CCHER project is funded by the National Science Foundation under Award # DRL-0814724