Award Abstract # 1759947
Understanding and Removing Faculty Barriers for the Adoption and Implementation of Proven Interventions

NSF Org: EES
Div. of Equity for Excellence in STEM
Recipient: SAN DIEGO STATE UNIVERSITY FOUNDATION
Initial Amendment Date: June 16, 2018
Latest Amendment Date: May 30, 2024
Award Number: 1759947
Award Instrument: Standard Grant
Program Manager: Jessie Dearo
jdearo@nsf.gov
 (703)292-5350
EES
 Div. of Equity for Excellence in STEM
EDU
 Directorate for STEM Education
Start Date: July 15, 2018
End Date: June 30, 2024 (Estimated)
Total Intended Award Amount: $1,103,645.00
Total Awarded Amount to Date: $1,249,830.00
Funds Obligated to Date: FY 2018 = $1,103,645.00
FY 2019 = $146,185.00
History of Investigator:
  • Dustin Thoman (Principal Investigator)
    dthoman@sdsu.edu
  • Felisha Herrera-Villarreal (Co-Principal Investigator)
  • Jessi Smith (Former Co-Principal Investigator)
Recipient Sponsored Research Office: San Diego State University Foundation
5250 CAMPANILE DR
SAN DIEGO
CA  US  92182-1901
(619)594-5731
Sponsor Congressional District: 51
Primary Place of Performance: San Diego State University
CA  US  92182-4611
Primary Place of Performance
Congressional District:
51
Unique Entity Identifier (UEI): H59JKGFZKHL7
Parent UEI: H59JKGFZKHL7
NSF Program(s): ECR-EDU Core Research
Primary Program Source: 04001819DB NSF Education & Human Resource
04001920DB NSF Education & Human Resource
Program Reference Code(s): 8212, 8816, 8817, CL10
Program Element Code(s): 798000
Award Agency Code: 4900
Fund Agency Code: 4900
Assistance Listing Number(s): 47.076

ABSTRACT

This study will investigate the factors that facilitate or hinder STEM undergraduate instructors from implementing strategies that have demonstrably positive impacts on student outcomes. The research will specifically focus on the study of one such intervention called the Utility Value Intervention (UVI), which has been shown to have a positive impact especially on students who are first generation college students or who are from racial and ethnic minority groups that are underrepresented in STEM fields. The UVI helps students to discover connections between science topics and their lives, and to make connections between STEM topics they are studying and their goals. Making these connections helps students appreciate the value of the work, leading to a deeper engagement and involvement which, in turn, enhances career motivation and performance. The proposed research focuses on understanding why faculty decide to adopt intervention strategies such as the UVI or not.

The study is framed by organizational theories of diversity resistance and social psychological theories of decision making. The project team will collect data from over 800 undergraduate biology instructors from a nationally representative sample. This will be complemented by interviews with 40 introductory biology instructors and field experiments with 624 biology instructors to understand attitudes toward adopting or resisting diversity-focused interventions. In later years of the project, the investigators will conduct a randomized controlled trial testing the optimized intervention delivery methods with a new nationally representative sample of 200 biology instructors. This project is supported by the Education and Human Resources Core Research Program, which funds fundamental research in STEM learning and learning environments, broadening participation in STEM, and STEM workforce development.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

PUBLICATIONS PRODUCED AS A RESULT OF THIS RESEARCH

Note:  When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

McPartlan, Peter and Thoman, Dustin_B and Poe, Jennifer and A_Herrera, Felisha and Smith, Jessi_L "Appealing to Faculty Gatekeepers: Motivational Processes for Intentions to Adopt an Evidence-B ased Intervention" BioScience , v.72 , 2022 https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biac029 Citation Details
Smith, Jessi L. and McPartlan, Peter and Poe, Jennifer and Thoman, Dustin B. "Diversity fatigue: A survey for measuring attitudes towards diversity enhancing efforts in academia." Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority Psychology , v.27 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1037/cdp0000406 Citation Details
Smith, Jessi L and Thoman, Dustin B "Scaling Up: Lessons for Persuading Science Faculty to Adopt an Evidence-Based Intervention" Journal of College Science Teaching , v.53 , 2024 https://doi.org/10.1080/0047231X.2024.2316388 Citation Details
Thoman, Dustin B. and Yap, Melo-Jean and Herrera, Felisha A. and Smith, Jessi L. "Diversity Interventions in the Classroom: From Resistance to Action" CBELife Sciences Education , v.20 , 2021 https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.20-07-0143 Citation Details

PROJECT OUTCOMES REPORT

Disclaimer

This Project Outcomes Report for the General Public is displayed verbatim as submitted by the Principal Investigator (PI) for this award. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this Report are those of the PI and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation; NSF has not approved or endorsed its content.

The science education community is deeply vested in growing the next generation of scientists.  One way to do this is through evidence-based interventions that support the motivation and performance of undergraduate students in introductory science classes. Researchers across education and psychology have developed and demonstrated efficacy for many such interventions. Unfortunately, the process of developing and evaluating pedagogical practices is not the same as the process required to scale those efforts into actual implementation within university classrooms. In this project, we examined both barriers to intervention adoption and strategies to facilitate adaption at scale. To do so, we focused on a single intervention, the utility value intervention (UVI), a classroom writing assignment intervention that has strong empirical support for boosting student motivation and performance by helping students see greater value in what they are learning. We collected data from randomly selected biology faculty who teach introductory courses across the United States using interviews, surveys, and experimental methods. In conceiving of implementing an evidence-based intervention as a “helping” behavior, we adapted the classic decision-making model of helping to inform our approach. The main objective was to understand the intervention implementation process, using the UVI as an exemplar intervention – with implications for other evidence-based classroom interventions.

 

Intellectual Merit: We started by asking the key question: What theory-informed strategies maximize faculty’s positive attitudes toward, and long term adoption of, the utility value intervention within their introductory biology course? Our findings point to specific barriers that make faculty less likely to adopt the UVI in their classroom, even after learning of its benefits. Although faculty widely viewed the UVI as valuable, their perceptions of costs (e.g. to time and trade-offs with investing time relative to other aspects of their work) lowered adoption likelihood. In addition, consistent with our expectations, biology faculty used social cues, or looked to their peers and institutional leaders, to evaluate whether pursuing these kinds of activities was both valued and normative. Through careful experimentation, our results showed three elements that together persuaded biology faculty to adopt the UVI in their classroom in some form: 1) Identify the situation and frame it as urgent 2) Ensure faculty feel responsible and 3) Offers tools and templates so faculty know how to act. These findings led us to identify several important institutional practices and policies that can promote intervention adoption, and we disseminated these lessons via several scholarly publications and presentations.

 

Broader impacts: Efforts to encourage faculty to adopt successful evidence-based classroom intervention practices often move slowly, through relatively small personal and professional networks. We developed and disseminated a complementary proactive strategy designed to raise awareness of the UVI across a broad swath of U.S. biology faculty. Our strategy resulted in this particular intervention being adopted in some form by more than 4 in 10 of faculty who learned about it, reaching an estimated 7,500 students across the U.S. We have shared this process, along with a detailed guide and ready-to-use resources concrete tools for faculty across a variety of platforms. Our theory-driven approach to finding and engaging science faculty using social psychological principles allows intervention researchers to broaden the reach and scale of their evidence-based efforts maximizing the public good and the public dollar. Our methods and results can serve as a catalyst to meaningfully change science student outcomes and broaden the scientific workforce.

 

 


Last Modified: 11/05/2024
Modified by: Dustin B Thoman

Please report errors in award information by writing to: awardsearch@nsf.gov.

Print this page

Back to Top of page