Cultivating institutional transformation has been of recent interest in education research. This theoretical paper presents six principles for supporting sustained change efforts at the department level. Considering change efforts at the level of "principles" is valuable because principles are grounded in theoretical and empirical knowledge, but are abstract enough to be adapted to many contexts. For each principle we argue for its value, drawing on previous literature in higher education, organizational change, discipline-based education research, and design thinking. We then give illustrative examples of how each principle was embodied within the Departmental Action Team (DAT) project. The DAT project facilitates the implementation of effective changes within university science, technology, engineering, and mathematics departments. We conclude with a discussion of how these principles can be applicable across a variety of institutional transformation efforts.

Group work is becoming increasingly common in introductory physics classrooms. Understanding how students engage in these group learning environments is important for designing and facilitating productive learning opportunities for students. We conducted a study in which we collected video of groups of students working on conceptual electricity and magnetism problems in an introductory physics course. In this setting, students needed to negotiate a common understanding and coordinate group decisions in order to complete the activity successfully. We observed students interacting in several distinct ways while solving these problems. Analysis of these observations focused on identifying the different ways students interacted and articulating what defines and distinguishes them, resulting in the development of the Modes of Collaboration framework. The Modes of Collaboration framework defines student interactions along three dimensions: social, discursive, and disciplinary content. This multi-dimensional approach offers a unique lens through which to consider group work and provides a flexibility that could allow the framework to be adapted for a variety of contexts. We present the framework and several examples of its application here.

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Supporting and sustaining positive educational change is an area of increasing focus in higher education and remains a persistent challenge. Using student partnerships is one promising way to help promote these much-needed changes. This case study focuses on Departmental Action Teams (DATs), which are groups of faculty, students, and staff working together in the same department to make sustainable improvements to undergraduate education. Here we focus on DATs from four different departments, across two research-intensive universities in the USA, to draw attention to the important roles that students play as change agents in these groups. We also reflect upon the inherent challenges in building partnerships that incorporate meaningful power sharing to effect educational change

Abstract. When physics students engage in collaborative exercises, they must negotiate their different problem-solving strategies in order to work together effectively. One lens through which to understand these interactions is the construct of "epistemic games". These constructs have been used to describe particular methods of problem solving with which students are observed to engage. In prior work, an "answer-making epistemic game" has been observed, wherein the student perceives the objective of the activity as producing an answer, and reasons until they arrive at an answer or intuits an answer and then tries to justify this answer. This game was observed in the context of individual students working independently on multiple-choice questions. We present preliminary analysis of the appearance of a shared answer-making epistemic game when a group of students worked collaboratively on conceptual problems.