Investigating how physics programs take up to a collaborative and data-informed approach to change

As calls for increased accountability influence institutional practices, a cultural facet that has received increased attention is the culture of assessment. In this project, we study the change process enacted by local Departmental Action Teams (DATs) resulting from physics faculty members' participation in the Departmental Leadership Action Institutes (DALIs). We developed case studies of three DALI-active physics programs. We investigate cultural shifts by following these programs for over a year, collecting data from multiple sources. We document the departments' dominant culture around the use of data and how the emerging microculture within the DAT is situated within that dominant culture. We find that past data collection efforts were a primary responsibility of a single person, rarely becoming the focus of joint attention. Whenever data received joint attention, it was approached in a cursory way without meaningfully informing collective change efforts. However, we found that within the DATs, data played a significant role in understanding the root causes of the problem. Finally, we found that a broad set of DAT stakeholders engaged in extensive collective discussions around the design of data collection and interpretation of findings