Developing Methods and Theories for Modeling Student Leadership and Students' Experiences of Academic Support

Abstract

This dissertation brings together two research strands that study: (a) the ways in which physics and STEM students contribute to growing capacity for institutional change within collaborative teams and (b) the support structures of graduate programs through an innovative methodology grounded in network science.

The first research strand is explored within two different team environments, one of a student-centric interinstitutional team and a second of departmental change teams. Across both of these contexts, I identify how by engaging in an interaction-based agency, students are able to jointly define their own roles and the projects they pursue. In comparing across these contexts, we identify how students navigate different leadership structures and how this can support or limit student contributions in these teams. A central contribution of this work is a model for cultivating capacity for change through shared leadership and relational agency. This model captures how capacity can be built in different domains tied to the activity systems of the work. We show how this model can help practitioners and facilitators better partner with students as well as how researchers can use this model to capture how students contribute to the work of the team.

The second research strand focuses on developing and applying an innovative methodology for network analysis of Likert-style surveys. This methodology generates a meaningful network based on survey item response similarity. I show how researchers can use modular analysis of the network to identify larger themes built from the connections of particular aspects. Additionally, I apply this methodology to provide a unique interpretation of responses to the Aspects of Student Experience Scale instrument for well-defined demographic groups to show how thematic clusters identified in the full data set re-emerge or change for different groups of respondents. These results are important for practitioners who seek to make targeted changes to their physics graduate programs in hopes of seeing particular benefits for particular groups.

This dissertation opens up lines for future work within both strands. The model for building capacity for change draws attention to the mediating processes that emerge on a team and in students’ interactions with others. This model can be developed further to include additional constructs and leadership structures, as well as explore the relevance to other academic contexts. For quantitative researchers, the network analysis for Likert-style surveys methodology is widely applicable and provides a new way to investigate the wide range of phenomena assessed by Likert-style surveys.