Developing the DELTA: Capturing Cultural Changes in Undergraduate Departments

Area of Science:

• Environmental Science
• Higher Education Research
• Organizational Psychology

Background:

• University departments are key to implementing campus sustainability initiatives.
• Measuring cultural change in academic departments is challenging due to complexity and the limitations of qualitative methods for large-scale studies.
• Existing methods for assessing cultural shifts in higher education are often not scalable across multiple departments.

Purpose of the Study:

• To introduce a novel survey instrument, the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA).
• To provide a validated tool for capturing cultural changes within undergraduate academic departments.
• To facilitate the measurement and study of sustainable transformations in higher education settings.

Main Methods:

• Development and validation of the Departmental Education and Leadership Transformation Assessment (DELTA) survey.
• Utilizing psychometric approaches to ensure the reliability and validity of the new assessment tool.
• Qualitative and quantitative analyses to establish the survey's efficacy in measuring departmental culture.

Main Results:

• The DELTA survey was successfully developed and validated as a reliable instrument.
• The survey effectively captures key aspects of cultural change relevant to sustainability in academic departments.
• Demonstrated utility of DELTA for large-scale assessment of departmental transformations.

Conclusions:

• The DELTA survey provides a scalable and quantitative method for assessing cultural change in university departments.
• This tool can aid researchers and practitioners in understanding and promoting sustainable practices in higher education.
• DELTA addresses the need for robust measurement in studying sustainability initiatives across multiple academic units.