Making Sense of Strategic Change at a University: How faculty understood their implementation of a cluster hiring initiative

Over the past half-century, American universities have come under increasing scrutiny by their stakeholders, and numerous interdisciplinary initiatives have been launched in response to this trend. However, little is known about how faculty members understand their implementation of these initiatives. It is critical that the experiences of such faculty be understood because the outcomes of interdisciplinary initiatives can be diminished by a lack faculty support. A qualitative case study was conducted of faculty members’ implementation of the Interdisciplinary Faculty Initiative at the University of Michigan between 2007 and 2012. Over two years, 49 interviews were conducted and analyzed along with hundreds of collected documents. Guided by the theory of sensemaking, I find that faculty largely understood that the contributions of the initiative were realized through their cultivation of expertise. Essentially, faculty implemented the initiative in ways that they believed allowed their scholarly activities to reflect some distinctive aspect of their expertise. But rather than doing this by equipping specific subject matter they had mastered or by collaborating with other recognized experts, they also used a specific form of communication – reflective sensegiving – to do this work. They engaged in reflective sensegiving by asking a series of general and exploratory questions to a wide range of colleagues over time. Doing so surfaced discrepant cues that they incorporated into their ongoing sensemaking which allowed them to better understand exactly how they could cultivate their expertise through the initiative they implemented. These findings make a contribution to the literature by investigating the conceptual relationships that exist between sensegiving and the sensemaking process. By showing how faculty search out ways to cultivate their expertise, this work also provides a contrast to many existing depictions of faculty work as being essentially competitive, paradigmatic, or pedagogical in nature. Finally, the findings of this study have implications for the use of interdisciplinary initiatives to facilitate organizational change in large American research universities. They suggest that without ensuring that the expectations of the participating faculty are aligned with each other over time in complementary ways, the intended outcomes of interdisciplinary initiatives may be unrealized, diverted, or delayed.PhDHigher EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113474/1/eliasms_1.pd

Research Methodology: An Innovative Approach to a Venerable Course

This paper outlines a number of innovations that we have recently implemented in the Research Methodology Course at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health. Consistent with the goals of evidence-based medicine, evidence-based public health, intrinsic motivation, and phase 4 (T4) translational research, we have placed the emphasis on enhancing the students’ desire to learn—and more specifically on their desire to learn rigorous methods for conducting useful research that delivers practical benefits in a straightforward manner. A dozen innovations, along with some preliminary outcomes, are outlined in detail. Clin Trans Sci 2010; Volume 3: 309–311Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/79360/1/j.1752-8062.2010.00239.x.pd

Measuring Illegal Immigration at US Border Stations by Sampling from a Flow of 500 Million Travelers

Five hundred million travelers enter the US yearly at a Port of Entry (POE) after an Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS) interview. We describe a general method for sampling from a flow, and summarize results from random reinspections of travelers at 20 POEs. Analyses reveal that 47 in 5614 travelers (0.8% ± 0.24%) were erroneously granted entry. Results suggest INS intercepts 9.3% to 16.0% of travelers attempting illegal entry at a POE, and that INS mistakenly admits 2.95 to 5.45 million illegal immigrants at POEs annually. Additional applications of our sampling method (e.g., for quality control, population studies) are briefly discussed.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43496/1/11111_2004_Article_363082.pd

Three Cs of Translating Evidence‐Based Programs for Youth and Families to Practice Settings

Despite the growing number of evidence‐based programs (EBPs) for youth and families, few are well‐integrated in service systems or widely adopted by communities. One set of challenges to widespread adoption of EBPs relates to the transfer of programs from research and development to practice settings. This is often because program developers have limited guidance on how to prepare their programs for broad dissemination in practice settings. We describe Three Cs of Translation, which are key areas that are essential for developers to translate their EBPs from research to practice settings: (1) Communicate the underlying theory in terms easily understandable to end users, (2) Clarify fidelity and flexibility, and (3) Codify implementation lessons and examples. Program developers are in the best position to describe their interventions, to define intervention core components, to clarify fidelity and flexibility, and to codify implementation lessons from intervention studies. We note several advantages for developers to apply the Three Cs prior to intervention dissemination and provide specific recommendations for translation. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/113697/1/cad20111.pd

Community Engagement in Youth Violence Prevention: Crafting Methods to Context

The purpose of the Youth Violence Prevention Centers (YVPC) Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is to reduce youth violence in defined high-risk communities through the implementation and evaluation of comprehensive, evidence based prevention strategies. Within this common framework, each YVPC varies in its structure and methods, however all engage communities in multiple ways. We explore aspects of community engagement employed by three centers that operate in very different contexts: a rural county in North Carolina; a suburban area of Denver, Colorado; and an urban setting in Flint, Michigan. While previous research has addressed theories supporting community involvement in youth violence prevention, there has been less attention to the implementation challenges of achieving and sustaining participation. In three case examples, we describe the foci and methods for community engagement in diverse YVPC sites and detail the barriers and facilitating factors that have influenced implementation. Just as intervention programs may need to be adapted in order to meet the needs of specific populations, methods of community engagement must be tailored to the context in which they occur. We discuss case examples of community engagement in areas with varying geographies, histories, and racial and ethnic compositions. Each setting presents distinct challenges and opportunities for conducting collaborative violence prevention initiatives and for adapting engagement methods to diverse communities. Although approaches may vary depending upon local contexts, there are certain principles that appear to be common across cultures and geography: trust, transparency, communication, commitment. We also discuss the importance of flexibility in community engagement efforts

Selecting, Implementing and Adapting Youth Empowerment Solutions

YES is an evidence-based program that empowers youth to make positive changes in their communities and to work with adults who support their efforts. The goals of the YES program are to: 1) provide youth with opportunities for meaningful involvement in preventing youth violence and creating community change; 2) enhance the ability of adults to support youth in an empowerment framework; and 3) change the social and physical environment to reduce and prevent violence (especially youth violence). The purpose of this guide is to assist organizations and communities in making decisions about selecting, implementing and adapting the Youth Empowerment Solutions (YES) program. It is designed for individuals who are responsible for choosing, supervising and carrying out youth programs. This guide is intended to be used in conjunction with the Youth Empowerment Solutions for Peaceful Communities curriculum, which is available for download through the YES website: http://yes.sph.umich.edu/curriculum/CDC Foundationhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/110221/1/YES Adaptation Guide FINAL.pdfDescription of YES Adaptation Guide FINAL.pdf : YES Adaptation Guid

Timing of Gestures: Gestures Anticipating or Simultaneous With Speech as Indexes of Text Comprehension in Children and Adults

The deep comprehension of a text is tantamount to the construction of an articulated mental model of that text. The number of correct recollections is an index of a learner's mental model of a text. We assume that another index of comprehension is the timing of the gestures produced during text recall; gestures are simultaneous with speech when the learner has built an articulated mental model of the text, whereas they anticipate the speech when the learner has built a less articulated mental model. The results of four experiments confirm the predictions deriving from our assumptions for both children and adults. Provided that the recollections are correct, the timing of gestures can differ and can be considered a further measure of the quality of the mental model, beyond the number of correct recollections

Neural correlates of the processing of co-speech gestures

In communicative situations, speech is often accompanied by gestures. For example, speakers tend to illustrate certain contents of speech by means of iconic gestures which are hand movements that bear a formal relationship to the contents of speech. The meaning of an iconic gesture is determined both by its form as well as the speech context in which it is performed. Thus, gesture and speech interact in comprehension. Using fMRI, the present study investigated what brain areas are involved in this interaction process. Participants watched videos in which sentences containing an ambiguous word (e.g. She touched the mouse) were accompanied by either a meaningless grooming movement, a gesture supporting the more frequent dominant meaning (e.g. animal) or a gesture supporting the less frequent subordinate meaning (e.g. computer device). We hypothesized that brain areas involved in the interaction of gesture and speech would show greater activation to gesture-supported sentences as compared to sentences accompanied by a meaningless grooming movement. The main results are that when contrasted with grooming, both types of gestures (dominant and subordinate) activated an array of brain regions consisting of the left posterior superior temporal sulcus (STS), the inferior parietal lobule bilaterally and the ventral precentral sulcus bilaterally. Given the crucial role of the STS in audiovisual integration processes, this activation might reflect the interaction between the meaning of gesture and the ambiguous sentence. The activations in inferior frontal and inferior parietal regions may reflect a mechanism of determining the goal of co-speech hand movements through an observation-execution matching process

Integration of iconic gestures and speech in left superior temporal areas boosts speech comprehension under adverse listening conditions

Iconic gestures are spontaneous hand movements that illustrate certain contents of speech and, as such, are an important part of face-to-face communication. This experiment targets the brain bases of how iconic gestures and speech are integrated during comprehension. Areas of integration were identified on the basis of two classic properties of multimodal integration, bimodal enhancement and inverse effectiveness (i.e., greater enhancement for unimodally least effective stimuli). Participants underwent fMRI while being presented with videos of gesture-supported sentences as well as their unimodal components, which allowed us to identify areas showing bimodal enhancement. Additionally, we manipulated the signal-to-noise ratio of speech (either moderate or good) to probe for integration areas exhibiting the inverse effectiveness property. Bimodal enhancement was found at the posterior end of the superior temporal sulcus and adjacent superior temporal gyrus (pSTS/STG) in both hemispheres, indicating that the integration of iconic gestures and speech takes place in these areas. Furthermore, we found that the left pSTS/STG specifically showed a pattern of inverse effectiveness, i.e., the neural enhancement for bimodal stimulation was greater under adverse listening conditions. This indicates that activity in this area is boosted when an iconic gesture accompanies an utterance that is otherwise difficult to comprehend. The neural response paralleled the behavioral data observed. The present data extends results from previous gesture-speech integration studies in showing that pSTS/STG plays a key role in the facilitation of speech comprehension through simultaneous gestural input