Browsing by Author "Kirk, Gary R."

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    Assessing systems thinking: A tool to measure complex reasoning through ill-structured problems
    Grohs, Jacob R.; Kirk, Gary R.; Soledad, Michelle M.; Knight, David B. (2018-06)
    An increasingly important aim of higher education is to develop graduates capable of addressing complex, interdependent problems. Systems thinking is a critical interdisciplinary skill that describes the cognitive flexibility needed to collaboratively work on problems facing society. Although institutions of higher education are asked to develop systems thinkers and many programs strive towards such an aim, mechanisms to assess this competency are lacking. This paper (1) presents a framework for operationalizing systems thinking competency, and (2) shares a novel scenario-based assessment tool based on the framework. The paper describes the iterative development of the community-level problem scenario and associated scoring rubric based on a set of 93 student responses. Appendices contain the full tool consisting of the problem scenario, scoring rubric, and other guiding documents to enable others to adopt the tool for research purposes or to assess student outcomes from university programs.
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    Constructions of Scarcity and Commodification in University Strategy: Restructuring at Virginia Tech
    Kirk, Gary R. (Virginia Tech, 2004-11-30)
    Higher education institutions in the United States have come under increased scrutiny due to increasing demands for accountability in the use of public funds and increasing visibility (Altbach, Berdahl, and Gumport, 1999; Trow, 1974). Colleges and universities must continually prove their credibility and legitimacy to their stakeholders, including government officials (Lawrence & Sharma, 2002), donors, students, and sponsors. The proving process may involve engagement in legitimacy-seeking behaviors designed to show efficiency, access, and quality in terms defined mostly by external perceptions. The decision to concentrate organizational resources on activities designed to influence the opinions of external agents has the potential to lead organizations away from their core values and historic missions. The case study that follows documents the restructuring of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech) and the drivers that led university administrators to pursue change. The case was developed based on a series of interviews with key informants associated with or affected by the restructuring process. Explanations for the restructuring and the underlying university goal of becoming a top 30 institution, included cost-savings and efficiency via a "fiscal rationalization"; the framing of programs in terms of their entrepreneurialism, innovativeness, and revenue generating capacity; and an emphasis on the economic development benefits of university programs. Even though Virginia Tech administrators were not expressly responding to external demands for restructuring, there was evidence to suggest that a need to construct a more business-like model for university structure and operations had entered the collective conscience of Virginia Tech's leadership. I document the rhetoric and actions that I believe influenced university administrators in their decision to restructure. I also draw attention to administrators' use of language that I believe exemplified the commodification of the university's human and intellectual capital. Theoretically, I believe that the constructs from resource dependency theory and neoinstitutional theory have relevance to the interpretation of this case. Specifically, the construction of legitimacy-seeking behaviors, the imperative to decrease reliance on external organizations (i.e., the state), and the institutionalization of acceptable management behaviors are aligned closely with the propositions of one or both of these theories. The lack of theoretical distinctiveness between these two organizational perspectives indicated a need for further research and limits the ability to anticipate the potential outcomes for Virginia Tech and the broader field of higher education.
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    Management for Program Sustainability Amidst Rapid Volunteer Turnover
    Burke, Patrick Breen (Virginia Tech, 2015-12-23)
    Program sustainability is a major issue for nongovernmental organizations. Sustainability depends on the ability of an organization to maintain its capacity, which can be severely hindered by high rates of personnel turnover. This is especially true for turnover in nonprofit organizations that offer volunteer-led programs and are consequently heavily reliant upon those individuals to carry out their missions. Creating a strong institutional memory for both tacit and explicit knowledge and properly managing volunteers are two critical elements in creating the capacity needed to maintain a high-quality program. This thesis analyzes the case of a youth center in Macedonia that is dependent upon its volunteers to function and is afflicted by sustainability and discontinuity issues in its programs due to a regular rapid turnover of its volunteers. The center promotes youth development through informal education of its participants, primarily high school youth. Interviews, participant observation and document analysis provided insight into the program sustainability issues present at the youth center. I present a series of scenarios that highlight the issues of volunteer management and institutional memory loss concerning volunteer turnover that I discovered in my analysis. I conclude by calling for better preservation of institutional memory, more targeted recruitment and training that emphasizes creating routines and establishing volunteer expectations to enable improved program sustainability.
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    A Multiple Case Study of an Interorganizational Collaboration: Exploring the First Year of a Public-Private Partnership Focused on Secondary STEM Education
    Gillen, Andrew L. (Virginia Tech, 2019-04-04)
    National calls for improving the prospects of STEM workforce development and broadening participation in STEM place the focus of change within the education system. Despite many efforts towards integrating STEM, and specifically engineering, into pre-college settings, mechanisms for change in schools towards these goals remain underdeveloped. While collaborative solutions involving multiple organizations across sectors towards addressing this complex problem appear promising, more work is needed to develop a critical understanding of the processes involved when such different organizations come together to collaborate towards a social goal. Based in an effort to bring more theoretical literature into the discourse around school-university-industry partnership, the purpose of this research is to contribute to a better understanding of how K-12 STEM interorganizational relationships develop in their initial stages by focusing on the collaborative processes and structures and to develop implications for future success of such collaborations. To accomplish this, I used a multiple case study design to investigate the collaborative processes that emerged in the first year of the partnership within VT PEERS (Virginia Tech Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools). I centered my analysis on select adult stakeholders in the collaborative problem who were also programmatic participants including teachers, administrators, industry partners, and university affiliates. Using pre-year and post-year semi-structured interviews with these stakeholders, I characterized the collaborative processes in the first year of the program. Interpretation of results comparing across cases indicated considerations for education and organizational theory literature as well as implications for collaborative practice. Findings confirmed the emergent and negotiated nature of interorganizational collaboration and highlighted the importance of managing communication and reflection in partnership. Organizational culture may impact capacity building when organizations come together towards a complex social goal, particularly when industry is involved, and autonomy and operational issues within the school system and teaching can make collaborating with schools particularly challenging. When organizations come together towards a social goal centered around one of the collaborative partners, equality in exchange may not be a good measure of success. With the caveat that communication needs to be well managed to build credibility among partners, an unequal but equitable exchange of resources may be appropriate in collaborations towards a social goal. While it is tempting to continue to measure quality in interorganizational collaborations narrowly by the outcomes produced, a macro-level look at the collaborative processes involved enables collaborative stakeholders to be intentional about designing for future success.
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    A multiple case study of an interorganizational collaboration: Exploring the first year of an industry partnership focused on middle school engineering education
    Gillen, Andrew L.; Grohs, Jacob R.; Matusovich, Holly M.; Kirk, Gary R. (2021-06-23)
    Background Calls to improve learning in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), and particularly engineering, present significant challenges for school systems. Partnerships among engineering industry, universities, and school systems to support learning appear promising, but current work is limited in its conclusions because it lacks a strong connection to theoretical work in interorganizational collaboration. Purpose/Hypothesis This study aims to reflect more critically on the process of how organizations build relationships to address the following research question: In a public-private partnership to integrate engineering into middle school science curriculum, how do stakeholder characterizations of the collaborative process align with existing frameworks of interorganizational collaboration? Design/Method This qualitative, embedded multiple case study considered in-depth pre- and post-year interviews with teachers, administrators, industry, and university personnel during the first year of the Partnering with Educators and Engineers in Rural Schools (PEERS) program. Transcripts were analyzed using a framework of interorganizational collaboration operationalized for our context. Results Results provide insights into stakeholder perceptions of collaborative processes in the first year of the PEERS program across dimensions of collaboration. These dimensions mapped to three central discussion points with relevance for school-university-industry partnerships: school collaboration as an emergent and negotiated process, tension in collaborating across organizations, and fair share in collaborating toward a social goal. Conclusions Taking a macro-level look at the collaborative processes involved enabled us to develop implications for collaborative stakeholders to be intentional about designing for future success. By systematically applying a framework of collaboration and capitalizing on the rich situational findings possible through a qualitative approach, we shift our understanding of collaborative processes in school-university-industry partnerships for engineering education and contribute to the development of collaboration theory.
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    Virginia Tech Food Access and Security Study
    Hall, Ralph P.; Ranganathan, Shyam; Agnew, Jessica L.; Christie, Maria Elisa; Kirk, Gary R.; Lucero, Christian; Clark, Susan F.; Archibald, Thomas G. (Virginia Tech, 2019-10-30)
    There is growing evidence to suggest that a substantial number of college and university students in the United States grapple with food insecurity during their studies. One of the most comprehensive surveys on this issue was conducted by The Hope Center with 33 participating four-year institutions. They estimated that 41% of students had low or very low food security (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2019). A review of food security studies by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) (2018) found similar results and that few students who qualified for food assistance were aware of federal food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP). In response to the increasing concern over students’ access to food, this study aims to document food security at Virginia Tech. The study was designed with two parallel goals: to contribute to the national conversation on food access and security amongst higher education students; and to inform a strategic response through data-informed programs and policies at Virginia Tech. The first phase of the study was conducted between Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 and consisted of semi-structured key informant interviews. The second phase was conducted between December 2018 and January 2019 and consisted of an anonymous survey distributed to 32,242 students (27,421 undergraduate and 4,821 graduate) located in Blacksburg. A total of 2,441 (8.9%) undergraduate and 589 (12.2%) graduate students completed the entire survey (for a combined response rate of 9.4%). This study finds that 29% (±3.8%) of undergraduate and 35% (±7%) of graduate students were classified as having low or very low food security based on the USDA food security instrument. These findings are comparable with The Hope Center study (Goldrick-Rab et al. 2019). Students with low/very low food security status were more likely to be Hispanic/Latino or Black/African American, be receiving a Pell grant or financing their education through sources that need to be repaid, have a low GPA, and/or have a disability. Graduate students were also more likely than undergraduate students to be unable to afford to eat balanced meals or have to cut the size of their meals due to a lack of available funds. In general, the proportion of graduate students experiencing food-access problems was greater than the proportion of undergraduate students. A diet diversity score (DDS) was also developed from the student survey to measure the foods consumed by an individual within the previous 24 hours. The DDS is a proxy for dietary quality and helps provide insight into the barriers that students might face in accessing nutritious foods. The study found that on average students classified as having low/very low food security also had a lower DDS. This finding confirms that low food security is associated with a lower diet quality in addition to not having access to enough food. Students who reported that they sometimes or often did not have enough to eat in the past 12 months were also asked if they have received benefits from a range of food assistance programs. Of the 219 students who were asked this question, only 9% (n=20) reported receiving some form of assistance. When asked why they had not used a food assistance program, the primary response was that they felt other people needed more assistance than they did. The next three most selected reasons were a lack of awareness about (1) whether they were eligible for a food assistance program, (2) what programs exist, and (3) whom to speak with about what resources are available. These findings are consistent with the GAO (2018) report. These results reveal that students who potentially need food assistance may not know where to look for help, and administrative and/or social barriers related to existing on- and off-campus services may prevent students from seeking help even if they know it is available. This report also documents a range of on- and off-campus food assistance services that are available for students and provides a summary of the feedback obtained from the key informant interviews on potential next steps that could be taken by Virginia Tech. These steps include enhancing the coordination among, and awareness of, existing food assistance programs on and off campus, and new ideas such as creating an on-campus food pantry or subsidizing the cost of dining for students in need. Regardless of which actions are taken, we believe this report reveals our collective responsibility to ensure that no student at Virginia Tech goes hungry or is unable to access nutritious foods, and to create a community that nurtures learning and growth for all of its members.