Changing Course: The Influence of Social Position and Social Networks On College Faculty’s Adoption of Educational Innovations

[摘要] Problem:In an era of rising tuition costs and accountability movements, colleges and their faculty find themselves under increasing pressure to adopt evidence-based teaching best practices.The science-of-learning field demonstrates the positive impact of research-based teaching practices and educational resources on student learning, but faces challenges in diffusing these strategies broadly.Research on diffusion of innovations can inform dissemination initiatives; previous studies predominantly focused on business and healthcare domains but not higher-education systems.This study contributes to our understanding of how the spread of educational innovations in higher education are associated with college instructors’ social positions and the information networks they consult.Methods: I conducted surveys of faculty members at U.S. colleges who became aware of three broadly diffused educational innovations: Calibrated Peer Review, Peer-led Team Learning, and the Student Assessment of Learning Gains.Survey data were combined with user logs and registration data.The analyses explore the likelihood that instructors aware of an innovation will adopt (or not) and the likelihood that adopters will become a change agent (or not) using survival analysis, Poisson and negative binomial regression, multinomial logit regression, and qualitative analysis.Results: Overall, instructors who consult social-exchange networks are more likely to adopt than faculty who consult anonymous-search networks.This association was sometimes affected by the social position of the potential adopter, but more often influenced by innovation characteristics. Tenured faculty and instructors from research universities who adopt are more likely to become change agents for an innovation than adopters who are not tenured or not from research universities.Findings also suggest the potential adopters filter information based on the change agent’s social position.Potential adopters use the change agents’ position as a proxy for credibility and compatibility in deciding to adopt or not and then to secure approval or resources from senior administrators during implementation.Conclusions: Social position and information networks are associated with faculty adoption patterns, but the findings suggest that innovation characteristics must also be considered.These characteristics include not only innovation attributes but also the structure of communities that develop to support the innovation’s use and dissemination.

[发布机构] Johns Hopkins University

[效力级别] Higher Education

[关键词] Diffusion of Innovations;Higher Education;Social Networks;Social Capital;Educational Innovations;Teaching;Sociology