written by Emily M. Walter, Andrea Beach, Charles R. Henderson, and Cody T. Williams

Most faculty have knowledge of evidence-based instructional practices and access to the  resources to carry them out. Despite this, efforts to transform postsecondary instruction have met  with only modest success. One measure of an institutional environment is climate. Climate is a more immediately  accessible and malleable construct than organizational culture, as it can be changed through policy or other administrative and organization-member actions. As such, climate is a productive conceptual frame to apply in research that attempts to inform policy and practice change initiatives. However, in order to measure the impact of change initiatives, it is paramount to have reliable and valid methods to measure climate and instructional practice. The goal  of this research study was to design and validate instruments that elicit (a) organizational climate for instructional improvement and (b) postsecondary instructional practices. The resulting surveys, SCII and PIPS, are reliable, interdisciplinary, and can collect data quickly from a large  number of participants. In this paper, we share these research tools, explain our development and  data collection processes, highlight preliminary results, and provide suggestions for use of the  instruments.

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Published May 1, 2017
Last Modified October 18, 2023