Departments are now recognized as an important locus for sustainable change on university campuses. Making sustainable changes typically requires a shift in culture, but culture is complex and difficult to measure. For this reason, cultural changes are often studied using qualitative methods that provide rich, detailed data. However, this imposes barriers to measuring culture and studying change at scale (i.e., across many departments). To address this issue, we introduce the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA), a new survey aimed at capturing cultural changes in undergraduate departments. We describe the survey's development and validation and provide suggestions for its utility for researchers and practitioners.

This paper begins with an overview of culture and change. Next, we introduce the DAT project and the theoretical basis for the core principles that inform our perspective of culture. Given this background, we describe the development of our survey, which we have named the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA) survey. We outline the data and analysis that informed the validation of the DELTA survey responses, and finally, we close with a discussion of how the DELTA survey may be used for both research and practice.