General Overview & Research Questions:

The authors discuss the challenge of implementing change in STEM higher education, specifically focusing on practitioners’ theories of change as a potential barrier. In particular, the authors address the issue of how change agents’ implicit theories of change impacts their ability to implement change processes. They also focus on STEM faculty, who are typically novice change agents with less experience to guide and modify implicit theories of change. In order to examine these issues, the authors studied the theories of change of practitioners on 11 campuses involved in STEM reform. The authors focus on change agents’ unexamined views about change, their learning and adoption of explicit theories of change, and the processes of implementing change.

Research Questions: “Do faculty and administrative participants in a project aimed at STEM reform hold implicit theories of change? If so, what are they? What interventions (e.g., presenting explicit theories of change, experience paired with explicit theories of change) help STEM faculty and administrators to question implicit theories and shape explicit theories?”

Key terms defined:

Theories of change – an expectation that certain actions will have particular outcomes for one reason or another

Explicit theories of change – well-formed theories of change with concrete goals and an explicit articulation of hypothesized preconditions for how and why particular strategies will lead to the expected outcome(s)

Implicit theories of change – unconscious and/or unarticulated and/or unexamined belief(s) about how change happens

Sensemaking – asserts that how a person makes meaning of their environment is a social and psychological process with 7 core properties: identity, retrospection, enactment, social, ongoing, cues, and plausibility

Sensegiving – focuses on the actions individuals take to help others understand and make meaning of their environment, including change efforts

Constructivist learning theory – learning experiences (e.g. past and current experience, case study, simulations) rather than abstract learning allows people to alter their perspectives

Organizational learning theory – data and information can help challenge assumptions that underlie organizational practice and inform a process of learning by the organization that enables change (experiential activity is not necessary for learning)

Findings:

Implicit theories can impede adopting explicit theories of change and implementing change efforts. Implicit theories of change found in the literature & held by STEM faculty:

• Understanding the problem is not necessary as change can be meaningfully created by starting with an intervention

• Change is a rational process and not political o Change is bottom-up or top-down

Implicit theories of change that may be particular to STEM faculty:

• Change needs to happen at the departmental level, not the institutional level

• Data alone is enough to convince people of the need for change

• Any change effort requires funding

Learning to challenge implicit theories of change and adopt explicit theories of change that support change efforts. Providing an abstract explicit theory of change had little to no effect.

• Experiential learning – some began challenging their implicit theories of change

• Pairing experiential learning with robust theories of change had greatest impact helping practitioners overcome barriers to change.

Implications:

1. Practitioners hold beliefs about how to bring about change that may be impeding elements of implementing change processes.

2. Change agents may benefit from a combination of the following:

   • tools to foster conscious challenges to our implicit theories of change

   • information about robust, explicit theories of change

   • experientially learning opportunities