Investigations of the Theory of Action This project brings together an interdisciplinary team of higher education scholars, psychologists, and disciplinary specialists from across three strategically selected universities -University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), Purdue University, and University of California, Irvine (UCI) -to design, test, and iteratively improve an approach to systematically identify which first and second-year courses would most benefit from the intervention, reveal student concerns that may be specific to that course, adapt the intervention to address those concerns and evaluate the universality versus specificity of the intervention across university contexts.
This systematic approach also includes persuasion and training processes for onboarding the instructors of the targeted courses.
The instructor onboarding and the intervention adaptation processes are guided by a theory-of-action that is the backbone of the project's research activities and iterative process improvement. A synergistic mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods are used throughout the study.
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grants IUSE 2111114/2111513. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation