The first decade of the 21st century brought major challenges to higher education, all of which have implications for and impact the future of faculty professional development. This volume provides ...the field with an important snapshot of faculty development structures, priorities and practices in a period of change, and uses the collective wisdom of those engaged with teaching, learning, and faculty development centers and programs to identify important new directions for practice. Building on their previous study of a decade ago, published under the title of Creating the Future of Faculty Development, the authors explore questions of professional preparation and pathways, programmatic priorities, collaboration, and assessment. Since the publication of this earlier study, the pressures on faculty development have only escalated-demands for greater accountability from regional and disciplinary accreditors, fiscal constraints, increasing diversity in types of faculty appointments, and expansion of new technologies for research and teaching. Centers have been asked to address a wider range of institutional issues and priorities based on these challenges. How have they responded and what strategies should centers be considering? These are the questions this book addresses.For this new study the authors re-surveyed faculty developers on perceived priorities for the field as well as practices and services offered. They also examined more deeply than the earlier study the organization of faculty development, including characteristics of directors; operating budgets and staffing levels of centers; and patterns of collaboration, re-organization and consolidation. In doing so they elicited information on centers' "signature programs," and the ways that they assess the impact of their programs on teaching and learning and other key outcomes. What emerges from the findings are what the authors term a new Age of Evidence, influenced by heightened stakeholder interest in the o
Through this study we sought to gain understanding of the challenges professors face as they make the transition to teaching online. We measured professors’ online teaching self-efficacy using survey ...research methods. Results showed that online teaching self-efficacy was high among the professors surveyed with no self-efficacy scores lower than 3.69 out of 5. The perception of student learning was the independent variable with the greatest impact on self-efficacy. Other variables that had a significant relationship with self-efficacy sub-scales were semesters taught online, future interest in teaching online, gender, satisfaction with teaching online, and academic discipline. The results suggest directions for faculty development interventions such as training and support structures.
Researchers, administrators, and policy makers need valid and reliable information about teaching practices. The Postsecondary Instructional Practices Survey (PIPS) is designed to measure the ...instructional practices of postsecondary instructors from any discipline. The PIPS has 24 instructional practice statements and nine demographic questions. Users calculate PIPS scores by an intuitive proportion-based scoring convention. Factor analyses from 72 departments at four institutions (N = 891) support a 2- or 5-factor solution for the PIPS; both models include all 24 instructional practice items and have good model fit statistics. Factors in the 2-factor model include (a) instructor-centered practices, nine items; and (b) student-centered practices, 13 items. Factors in the 5-factor model include (a) student--student interactions, six items; (b) content delivery, four items; (c) formative assessment, five items; (d) student-content engagement, five items; and (e) summative assessment, four items. In this article, we describe our development and validation processes, provide scoring conventions and outputs for results, and describe wider applications of the instrument.
Adoption of evidence based instructional practices is not widespread in American institutions of higher education. This is due in part to reforms focusing on individual teaching practices rather than ...conditions for system reform. Since measurement of organizational conditions is critical for widespread change, we developed and validated the Survey of Climate for Instructional Improvement (SCII). SCII has 30 Likert-scale statements, 5 supplementary questions, and 9 demographic items. It is designed to measure five aspects of organizational climate in postsecondary settings: leadership, collegiality, resources, respect for teaching, and organizational support. The goal of this paper is to describe (a) our development process, (b) steps in validation, and (c) patterns in the data from 917 instructors at six institutions of higher education in the United States. Our results indicate that the instrument is reliable and has the potential to differentiate among institutions, disciplines, departments, and other demographic variables. Although the survey is interdisciplinary, we highlight notable organizational climate differences between STEM and non-STEM disciplines. We also identify organizational climate differences for cis-gender women and graduate student instructors, highlighting unique professional support needs for these groups. We expect our findings and the instrument to be useful for campus change leaders, faculty developers, higher education researchers, and discipline-based education researchers.
To evaluate the association between brain structural markers and caregiving strain among older informal caregivers.
A secondary data analysis combining data from the Caregiver Health Effects Study ...(1993-1994) and the Cardiovascular Health Study MRI examination (1992-1994).
Four United States communities.
Co-residing spousal caregivers (N = 237; mean age: 76.2 years, SD: 2.2 years).
Visually rated ventricular and white matter (WM) grades from magnetic resonance imaging, caregiving strain defined as "emotional or physical strain associated with providing care" for any of 12 activities of daily living (ADLs) and instrumental activities of daily living (IADLs), plus measures of caregiving characteristics and caregiver's health.
Overall, 56% of caregivers reported strain. We detected an interaction where strain was very common (>82%) among caregivers who helped with four or more IADLs, regardless of WM grades, and among caregivers with the worst WM grades (WM grades ≥4), regardless of the number of IADLs they helped with. Among caregivers helping with fewer than four IADLs, having WM grade 4 or greater was associated with a 55% higher prevalence ratio for reporting strain. This association remained statistically significant but was most markedly attenuated by adjustments for: care recipient's memory and behavioral problems, caregiver's depression symptoms, and caregiver's ADL impairment.
Caregiving strain is very common among older informal caregivers who provide help with many IADLs, and among caregivers who help with fewer IADLs, but have manifest signs of white matter pathology. Modern quantitative-neuroimaging studies are needed to evaluate whether more subtle variability in brain structure confers caregiving strain and the related health consequences.
Background
Collecting data on instructional practices is an important step in planning and enacting meaningful initiatives to improve undergraduate science instruction. Self-report survey instruments ...are one of the most common tools used for collecting data on instructional practices. This paper is an instrument- and item-level analysis of available instructional practice instruments to survey postsecondary instructional practices. We qualitatively analyzed the instruments to document their features and methodologically sorted their items into autonomous categories based on their content. The paper provides a detailed description and evaluation of the instruments, identifies gaps in the literature, and provides suggestions for proper instrument selection, use, and development based on these findings.
Results
The 12 instruments we analyzed use a variety of measurement and development approaches. There are two primary instrument types: those intended for all postsecondary instructors and those intended for instructors in a specific STEM discipline. The instruments intended for all instructors often focus on teaching as well as other aspects of faculty work. The number of teaching practice items and response scales varied widely. Most teaching practice items referred to the format of in-class instruction (54 %), such as group work or problem solving. Another important type of teaching practice items referred to assessment practices (35 %), frequently focusing on specific types of summative assessment items used.
Conclusions
The recent interest in describing teaching practices has led to the development of a diverse set of available self-report instruments. Many instruments lack an audit trail of their development, including rationale for response scales; whole instrument and construct reliability values; and face, construct, and content validity measures. Future researchers should consider building on these existing instruments to address some of their current weaknesses. In addition, there are important aspects of instruction that are not currently described in any of the available instruments. These include laboratory-based instruction, hybrid and online instructional environments, and teaching with elements of universal design.
Using case studies, explores the substantial variation in faculty work within one institutional type--research universities. Examines the implications of this variation for state policies designed to ...improve teaching and learning, and for institutional policies meant to achieve a better balance between teaching, research, and service. (EV)
Assessing faculty learning communities Hubball, Harry; Clarke, Anthony; Beach, Andrea L.
New directions for teaching and learning,
Spring 2004, Volume:
2004, Issue:
97
Journal Article
Evaluation and assessment are critical to the success of FLCs, and authentic assessment has the potential to contribute greatly to the quality of FLC experiences in terms of both process and outcomes.
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