University-mediated student achievement:
An exercise in organizational learning

Hugh Mehan

The Center for Research on Educational Equity, Access, and Teaching Excellence (CREATE)
University of California San Diego

This paper describes the efforts of the Center for Research on Educational Equity, Access, and Teaching Excellence (CREATE) at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) to improve the opportunity for low income students of color to attend colleges and universities by assisting public schools in San Diego adapt the principles developed at the highly successful Preuss School on the UCSD campus to their local circumstances. CREATE, operating as an “educational field station,” serves as a mediator between the Preuss School and local schools that have expressed an interest in building a college-going culture of learning in order to improve the education of underrepresented minority students.

The research goal is to understand learning as a process distributed among organizations, how organization-level factors shape the behaviors of the people who constitute the organization, and the ways in which inter-institutional collaborations facilitate or inhibit learning. “Organizational learning” will have occurred when new information has been instantiated in new practices and routines and that new information is encoded in organizational artifacts (such as instruction manuals, code books, organizational charts). Inter-institutional learning, in this view, will be manifested in more effective forms of joint activity, e.g. mutual modifications in the service of the organizations’ common goals.

The research problem is to determine whether, through inter-organizational collaboration, the UCSD-based school and the inner city schools (Lincoln and Gompers Charter Middle School) can create a learning system that will enable the latter to achieve at a comparable level of achievement to the former. The collaboration will require organizational learning in three institutions: UCSD, The Preuss School, each of the two inner city schools. These relations are presented graphically below: