Charu Thakral, Ph.D. - US grants

This project aims to establish an institution-wide imperative to improve classroom climate, instructional quality, and degree pathways in all Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics departments at the University of Illinois-Chicago, a broad-access Hispanic-Serving Institution. Many institutional transformation efforts do not yield broad impact on an entire institution due to their focus on a single course or small cadre of teaching faculty. To accomplish institutional transformation at a large, decentralized university, the project will implement departmental action teams that involve over 100 faculty across the university who will investigate the barriers to student success in their classrooms with close attention to institutional data. Departmental action teams will develop and implement individual action plans to address identified barriers through curricular, instructional, and policy reforms. The work of these teams will be complemented by a campus-level initiative that disseminates high-quality faculty professional development with a concerted focus on helping faculty implement evidence-based inclusive teaching practices. Supported by the Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI Program), this project will transform the university to achieve an inclusive and highly productive campus environment for both students and faculty that reflects an institutional culture where students see faculty as advocates for their success.

The goal of institutional transformation that lies at the heart of this project will present an opportunity to study both the efficacy of interventions proposed by the departmental action teams and the resulting institutional change processes. The project will contribute to theories of change in organizations in ways that have not been systematically studied in the context of a large, public, minority-serving research-extensive university. Project researchers will study the evolution of the change effort to identify barriers to change and strategies for overcoming those barriers as each department improves its capacity to deliver engaging and inclusive pedagogies by conducting a systematic analysis of the work of each team and the evolution of the teaching culture at UIC in response to project programming. Using surveys, observational protocols, and interviews, project researchers will produce an evidentiary basis for institutional transformation following a teleological theory of change. This will include demonstrating the unique and common change processes across multiple academic departments units at the same university and how those processes are facilitated or hindered at other institutional levels. Finally, the dissemination plan calls for the production of an online roadmap to provide guidelines for launching data-driven change efforts that are attentive to local contexts. The HSI Program aims to enhance undergraduate STEM education, broaden participation in STEM, and build capacity at HSIs. Achieving these aims, given the diverse nature and context of the HSIs, requires innovative approaches that incentivize institutional and community transformation and promote fundamental research (i) on engaged student learning, (ii) about what it takes to diversify and increase participation in STEM effectively, and (iii) that improves our understanding of how to build institutional capacity at HSIs. Projects supported by the HSI Program will also draw from these approaches to generate new knowledge on how to achieve these aims.

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.