Theories of change are strengthening monitoring, evaluation and learning. As a monitoring tool, a Theory of Change helps identify useful indicators to assess progress and can facilitate adaptive management. These represent the projects concrete activities. Appropriate Scope also integrates the evaluation concept of accountability. Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change. Change in STEM higher education occurs within a complex system and attending to various parts of the system helps change agents consider factors that may influence the way in which a change initiative plays out. This meta-theory of change was developed through a series of workshops in 2015 with . Woodbury, S., & Gess-Newsome, J. Once a long-term goal is identified, the group then considers: What conditions must be in place for us to reach the goal? Any such necessary conditions should be shown as outcomes on the Theory of Change pathway, underneath the long-term outcome. The added value of Theory of Change lies in revealing the conceptual model, including the causal relationships between and among outcomes, the relationships of activities to outcomes, and of outcomes to indicators. For members of a project team, assessing indicators can help provide motivation as it makes progress towards outcomes visible. Educational Researcher, 40(7), 331337. One Health theory of change - World Health Organization (WHO) 2. Community Toolbox: Developing a logic model or theory of change. Activities and timelines. The use of Theory of Change in planning and evaluation has increased among philanthropies, government agencies, development organizations, universities, international NGOs, the UN, and many other major organizations in both developed and developing countries. As monitoring and evaluation data become available, stakeholders can periodically refine the Theory of Change as the evidence indicates. This supports the creation and implementation of an action plan, as well as monitoring of that plan. Cooperrider, D., & Whitney, D. (2001). New Directions for Evaluation 128 (Winter). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9831-0. However, research on why faculty adopt evidence-based teaching strategies indicate that they rely on personal experiences to a much greater extent than empirical evidence (Andrews & Lemons, 2015; Dancy et al., 2016). In addition, a theory of change is often required by funding agencies as part of grant proposals. Far from exhaustive, this manuscript provides examples of how some commonly used change theories can inform a change project. Specifically, the four frames model operationalizes culture as an ever-changing set of structures and underlying ways of thinking, and the resulting power relationships between individuals (Reinholz & Apkarian, 2018). In general, this is done by articulating a guiding long-term outcome for the initiative. Purposeful Program Theory: Effective Use of Theories of Change and Logic Models. To evaluate complex community initiatives focused on social change, a theory of change was designed as a tool to help clearly articulate underlying assumptions from the offset. Since the publication of Weisss book, the use of planning and evaluation using theories of change has increased exponentially among philanthropies, government agencies, international NGOs, the UN and many other major organizations in both developed and developing countries. http://www.wkkf.org/knowledge-center/resources/2010/Logic-Model-Development-Guide.aspx. Leading change. Social Studies of Science. Many possible indicators for teaching practices are described in a single report that reviews approaches to measuring and documenting STEM teaching practices (American Association for the Advancement of Science, 2012). The construction of such a diagram typically begins from the top down, with a user first identifying the long-term outcome, then the preconditions on the way to the outcome, and finally appropriate interventions. CBE-Life Sciences Education, 13(2), 167178. A. Individual, group, and organization learning are connected by four bi-directional processes: intuiting, interpreting, integrating, and institutionalizing (Crossan et al., 1999). As in other applications, a research ToC describes the causal relationships between a research project or program and its intended results (i.e., outputs, outcomes, and impacts), framed as a set of testable hypotheses about how and why research contributes to change.[20][24]. W.K. Howard Hughes Medical Institute. If strategy is about seizing opportunities and trying out what works, the Theory of Change model serves as a guiding frame of reference. Similarly, a project may draw from multiple change theories to inform each part of a theory of change. The Outcomes Mapping focus on changes in behavior would tend to direct a Theory of Change toward outcomes like this, which are outcomes the change agent cares most about and which it can relatively easily monitor and evaluate. Projects may use surveys and inventories, interviews, systematic classroom observations, participant observation, and other approaches to collect data about an indicator. National Science Foundation. This process is focused on coherent, collective action. The "pathway of change" graphically represents the change process and acts as the skeleton around which the other elements of the theory are developed. Reinholz, D.L., Andrews, T.C. Hayward, C. N., & Laursen, S. L. (2018). Your privacy choices/Manage cookies we use in the preference centre. The innovation of Theory of Change lies (1) in making the distinction between desired and actual outcomes and (2) in requiring stakeholders to model their desired outcomes before they decide on forms of intervention to achieve those outcomes. Promoting instructional change in new faculty: An evaluation of the physics and astronomy new faculty workshop. (2005). Theory change is a community process of feedback, experiment, observation, and communication. This approach could thereby help to avoid mapping outcomes involving broad shifts in behavior and values among whole populations, which are easy to think about, but are very difficult to monitor and to attribute to any one program. Increasing student success in STEM: A guide to systemic institutional change. The model inventories and describes parts of this system and why they can be expected to influence education reform. Although many early childhood programs find these four domains work well to capture their theory of change, the IDEAS Impact Framework ToC template is also designed to be flexible. The term theory of change itself was popularized by Weiss, through the work of the Aspen Institute and the Roundtable on Community Change (Anderson, 2005; Weiss, 1995). In contrast, HHMI appears to be referring to a project-specific articulation of planned activities and how they are expected workwhich is referred to as a theory of change in the evaluation community. (2004). Your leverage is how much investment others put into your model. Nonetheless, because our collective knowledge of how change occurs in STEM higher education is incomplete, teams will still rely on some assumptions when they design a project. Anderson, A. For instance, research on social networks can be useful because it helps identify opinion leaders and tracks relationships across a social system, such as a department (e.g., Andrews, Conaway, Zhao, & Dolan, 2016; Grunspan, Wiggins, & Goodreau, 2014; Hayward & Laursen, 2018; Quardokus & Henderson, 2015). Learning Communities Journal, 9, 532. Understanding classrooms through social network analysis: a primer for social network analysis in education research. . There would be proportionately less attention to outcomes such as every child is within five minutes walk of a playground or residents are healthy. It was designed as a "refresher course" for planners, evaluators, and others who have attended one of the Roundtable's Theory of Change Workshops,2 but we fully expect experienced facilitators will be able to quickly learn and apply the method as 2010. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. As it is forward looking and logical, Theory of Change reflects the way we think logically that is, if a, then band chronologicallyfirst this, then that. Penuel, W. R., Fishman, B. J., Cheng, B. H., & Sabelli, N. (2011). Examples of social network indicators may be increasing the number of opinion leaders, increasing the density of a network, or increasing the strength of relationships related to undergraduate teaching in a department. What Is Motivational Interviewing? A Theory of Change Theory of Change can support collective visioning, foster a shared understanding between stakeholders, and bridge thought-styles and different ways of knowing. Retrieved from https://www.hhmi.org/science-education/programs/inclusive-excellence-new-competition-announcement. Similarly, the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes (HHMI) Inclusive Excellence Initiative expects an institution that wins the award to develop its theory of change within the particular context of the campus (Howard Hughes Medical Institute, 2019). Organisational Research Services, Seattle. Henderson, C., Dancy, M., & Niewiadomska-Bugaj, M. (2012). Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR). Between 2000 2002, the Aspen Roundtable for Community Change led the dissemination and case studies of the Theory of Change approach, although still mostly applied to the field of community initiatives. Washington, DC: Aspen Institute. The River Model includes eight stages: (1) establishing vision, (2) examining the landscape and conducting capacity analysis, (3) identifying and analyzing challenges and opportunities, (4) choosing strategies, (5) determining readiness for action, (6) beginning implementation, (7) measuring results, and (8) disseminating results and planning next steps. Evaluation guide: Developing and using a logic model. For instance, starting in 2014, the National Science Foundations (NSF) Improving Undergraduate STEM Education (IUSE) program created a strand focused on Institutional and Community Transformation. Which change interventions have been designed and revised with change theory in mind may become obvious as a team builds their own theory of change around an intervention and is faced with questions about how the suggested activities will result in the desired outcomes. TOC maps out your initiative through 6 stages: Identifying long-term goals Backwards mapping and connecting the preconditions or requirements necessary to achieve that goal and explaining why these preconditions are necessary and sufficient. (2016). (2002). (2018). Science Education. 51 (1): 100120. An important advancement for education reform efforts in undergraduate STEM has been increased focus on the system and culture in which teaching and learning occur (e.g., Henderson et al., 2011). Physical Review Physics Education Research, 12(2), 020136. A comprehensive description of the elements of a theory of change was developed through the Aspen Institute Roundtable on Community Change (Anderson, 2005; Weiss, 1995). Rather, what we describe is based on a well-established approach from the evaluation literature and serves as a useful framework for clarifying the differences between a theory of change and change theory. Michigan. Weiss, C. H. (1995). Ottawa: International Development Research Centre. Experience has shown that blindly copying or scaling an intervention hardly ever works. As well, there may be a need to pick the right indicators from among the many available, and one can use monitoring questions to select the indicators that will be most helpful. 4. When efforts have been successful, such as the FIRST project in biology and the New Faculty Workshops in physics, they have improved their impact over time through iterative evaluation research and revision (e.g., Henderson, 2008; Ebert-May et al. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032001009. Often, a project team has made tentative decisions about their intervention before they begin developing a theory of change. https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T. DFID, London. To guide its work, a DAT completes a series of shared visioning activities to develop consensus on a focal issue and set of outcomes. Cite this article. Because these research threads have developed largely in parallel to research from the evaluation community, they are similar to, but not connected to the scholarship around theory of change. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-020-0202-3, https://doi.org/10.1016/0749-5978(91)90020-T, https://live-ccliconference.pantheonsite.io/measuring-teaching-practices/, http://www.theoryofchange.org/pdf/TOC_fac_guide.pdf, https://www.theoryofchange.org/pdf/Superwomen_Example.pdf, https://www.cdc.gov/eval/logicmodels/index.htm, http://www.compadre.org/Repository/document/ServeFile.cfm?ID=14196&DocID=4548, https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X032001009, https://wcer.wisc.edu/docs/working-papers/Working_Paper_No_2015_02.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.12.010110, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-018-0120-9, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTPER.8.020104, https://www.hhmi.org/science-education/programs/inclusive-excellence-new-competition-announcement, https://www.nsf.gov/publications/pub_summ.jsp?ods_key=nsf19601, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-014-9831-0, https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-018-0103-x, https://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/overview/models-for-community-health-and-development/logic-model-development/main, https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. Encyclopedia of Evaluation (pp. A positive revolution in change: Appreciative inquiry. Although there are many ways that research and theory can contribute to a change effort, we focus on five that we argue are a useful guiding framework for grounding a theory of change in existing scholarly work. WHAT IS A THEORY OF CHANGE? . As another example, researchers might assume that lasting changes can be made through a single, momentous change event, rather than through careful, ongoing attention to sustainable improvements. Theory of Change Technical Papers: A Series of Papers to support Development of Theories of change Based on Practice in the Field. Inclusive excellence new competition announcement. The authors are grateful for ongoing efforts to build community around the scholarship of change in STEM education. Here, we draw from the terminology used in the guidebook, recognizing it as one of the definitive sources for developing a theory of change. (1980) The multi-goal, theory-driven approach to evaluation: A model linking basic and applied social science in Social Forces, 59, 106122. In Theory of Change, by contrast, the group begins not with its intervention but with its long-term goal and outcomes and then works backward (in time) toward the earliest changes that need to occur. The four frames model of organizational change can draw attention to different aspects of the system, because it focuses specifically on culture within organizations. The stream of work leading to the use of theories of change in evaluation can be traced back to the late 1950s with Kirkpatricks Four Levels of Learning Evaluation Model. In an ideal world, as the orthodox view has it, a theory of change would generally be developed a priori, guiding intervention design as it is underway and before a programme's implementation . Thus, a theory of change that included presenting faculty with evidence to increase their interest and motivation to use evidence-based practices should reconsider assumptions they are making about how faculty use evidence in making teaching decisions. Grounding projects in change theory allows change agents to draw on existing knowledge and to better contribute to our collective knowledge about how to achieve meaningful change in STEM higher education. This is the "Unfreezing" stage.
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who developed the theory of change
