Abstract
More effective teaching and learning can be promoted through faculty professional development that shifts delivery from instructor-centered, information-transmission teaching by lecture to more student-centered, conceptual-change learning by active learning through student engagement. The National Science Foundation IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) project has funded a large-scale faculty development program at a large southwestern university called Justin-Time-Teaching with Two Way Formative Feedback for Multiple Disciplines (JTFD). The first full year of the project has trained 43 faculty in four of seven disciplines using a train-the-trainer model to engage faculty in year-long apprenticeships on evidence-based instructional strategies (EBIS) for teaching and learning. The first semester of professional development was comprised of 8 biweekly workshops followed by a second semester of 6 disciplinary community of practice (CoP) discussion sessions that supported classroom innovation implementation. These sessions supported participants' implementation of innovation in their classrooms and discussed issues, opportunities and challenges that faculty encountered as they developed and tested strategies for shifting their classrooms toward greater EBIS practices. Faculty change related to EBIS and its use was assessed with pre and post surveys with respect to faculty awareness, use, motivation, and practice. For awareness of familiarity of EBIS on topics like effective learning, active learning, and student teams there was a 31% average positive change. For EBIS use on four items of active learning, cooperative learning, objectives and Blooms' taxonomy there was a 26% increase. To determine motivation to implement EBIS strategies of real-world applications, student-to-student discussions, and formative feedback, a new survey using expectancy-value theory was created called Value, Expectancy, and Cost of Testing Educational Reforms Survey (VECTERS). There were positive gains for all three strategies for motivation (expectancy, value, and lowered cost) and reported and planned use, with the highest gains for real-world applications of 8% to 12%. Teaching with more EBIS student-centered classroom practice was assessed with classroom observations with a tool called Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) which has 25 items related to EBIS practice and is used by trained observers to assess classroom practice. There was a positive gain of 22% for all faculty from pre (early fall) to post (late spring) observations indicating a significant shift toward EBIS classroom practice. For the CoP sessions there was a short post-session quantitative and qualitative survey given for all six sessions. All results were quite positive across the six meetings with Likert scale responses of 4.5 to 4.6 on a 5 point scale on topics such as session relevance to teaching, new ideas for implementation, value of community building, and that collaborative and cooperative strategies can improve instruction effectiveness. Overall, results of the first year of the project have had a very positive impact on participating faculty and demonstrate that the JTFD approach is successful and could be a model transportable to other disciplines and institutions.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Journal | ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings |
| Volume | 2018-June |
| State | Published - Jun 23 2018 |
| Event | 125th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition - Salt Lake City, United States Duration: Jun 23 2018 → Dec 27 2018 |
Funding
The authors gratefully acknowledge support of this work by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1524527. The authors gratefully acknowledge support of this work by the National Science Foundation under GrantoN. 1524527. Research has shown that instruction through active learning by student engagement is more effective than traditional knowledge transmission through lecture [1], [2]. However, most engineering faculty still teach as they were taught, by information transmission through lecture. Thus, the challenge becomes as to how to shift instruction and classroom practice from faculty-centered teaching to student-centered learning. Creating materials that can be used for engagement teaching is insufficient because there needs to be an actual shift in faculty beliefs about their own instruction. Such a shift needs to move instructors from viewing themselves as disseminators of knowledge and concepts to learning advocates who facilitate students in learning the desired knowledge and concepts through their own engagement with fellow students. A means to promote this shift in beliefs and practice has been the creation of a faculty development program. Such a program is funded by the National Science Foundation IUSE (Improving Undergraduate STEM Education) program for large-scale faculty development program at a large southwestern university. It is called Just-inTime-Teaching with Two Way Formative Feedback for Multiple Disciplinary (JTFD) Programs. The project scales a previous, smaller single disciplinary development program, Just-in-Time Teaching with Frequent Formative Feedback (JTF) [3], to seven engineering disciplines with 83 faculty. The seven disciplines include aerospace (AE), biomedical (BME), chemical (CHE), civil, (CEE) materials (MSE), and mechanical engineering (ME), as well as construction (CON). It uses a train-the-trainer model to engage faculty in year-long apprenticeships with a first fall semester of eight biweekly workshops followed by a second spring semester of six biweekly mentor-supported, disciplinary community-of-practice (CoP) classroom implementation biweekly discussions.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- General Engineering
