Board #68 : Scaling a Faculty Professional Development Program to Multiple Disciplines through Disciplinary Communities of Practice Evolving from Evidence-Based Workshops
- Conference
- Location
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Columbus, Ohio
- Publication Date
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June 24, 2017
- Start Date
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June 24, 2017
- End Date
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June 28, 2017
- Conference Session
- Tagged Topic
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NSF Grantees Poster Session
- Page Count
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14
- DOI
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10.18260/1-2--27973
- Permanent URL
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https://peer.asee.org/27973
- Download Count
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615
Paper Authors
Stephen J Krause Arizona State University
Stephen Krause is professor in the Materials Science Program in the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches in the areas of introductory materials engineering, polymers and composites, and capstone design. His research interests include evaluating conceptual knowledge, misconceptions and technologies to promote conceptual change. He has co-developed a Materials Concept Inventory and a Chemistry Concept Inventory for assessing conceptual knowledge and change for introductory materials science and chemistry classes. He is currently conducting research on an NSF faculty development program based on evidence-based teaching practices. The overall goal is to develop disciplinary communities of practice across the college of engineering. The approach is being promoted through semester-long faculty workshops and then through a semester of supported implementation of faculty classroom innovations. Changes in faculty beliefs and classroom practice should positively impact student performance and retention. He was a coauthor for the best paper award at the FIE convention in 2009 and the best paper award in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2013.
James A Middleton Arizona State University
James A. Middleton is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology at Arizona State University. For the last three years he also held the Elmhurst Energy Chair in STEM education at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Previously, Dr. Middleton was Associate Dean for Research in the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University, and Director of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992, where he also served in the National Center for Research on Mathematical Sciences Education as a postdoctoral scholar.
Keith D. Hjelmstad Arizona State University
Keith D. Hjelmstad is Professor of Civil Engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.
Eugene Judson
Arizona State University
orcid.org/0000-0002-0124-8476
Eugene Judson is an Associate Professor of for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. He also serves as an Extension Services Consultant for the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). His past experiences include having been a middle school science teacher, Director of Academic and Instructional Support for the Arizona Department of Education, a research scientist for the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (CRESMET), and an evaluator for several NSF projects. His first research strand concentrates on the relationship between educational policy and STEM education. His second research strand focuses on studying STEM classroom interactions and subsequent effects on student understanding. He is a co-developer of the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) and his work has been cited more than 1800 times and his publications have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals such as Science Education and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.
Robert J Culbertson Department of Physics, Arizona State University
Robert J. Culbertson is an Associate Professor of Physics. Currently, he teaches introductory mechanics and electrodynamics for physics majors and a course in musical acoustics, which was specifically designed for elementary education majors. He is director of the ASU Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) Project, which strives to produce more and better high school physics teachers. He is also director of Master of Natural Science degree program, a graduate program designed for in-service science teachers. He works on improving persistence of students in STEM majors, especially under-prepared students and students from under-represented groups.
Casey Jane Ankeny Arizona State University
Casey J. Ankeny, PhD is lecturer in the School of Biological and Health Systems Engineering at Arizona State University. Casey received her bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2006 and her doctorate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in 2012 where she studied the role of shear stress in aortic valve disease. Currently, she is investigating cyber-based student engagement strategies in flipped and traditional biomedical engineering courses. She aspires to understand and improve student attitude, achievement, and persistence in student-centered courses.
Ying-Chih Chen Arizona State University
Ying-Chih Chen is an assistant professor in the Division of Teacher Preparation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.
His research takes two distinct but interrelated paths focused on elementary students’ learning in science and engineering as well as in-service science teachers’ professional development. The first focus involves how language as a learning tool improves students’ conceptual understandings, literacy, and representation competencies in science. His second research focus is on how in-service teachers develop their knowledge for teaching science and engineering in argument-based inquiry classrooms. This research is aimed at developing measures of teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for adopting the argument-based inquiry approach, as well as developing tools to capture the interactive nature of PCK.
Lydia Ross Arizona State University
Lydia Ross is a doctoral student and graduate research assistant at Arizona State University. She is a second year student in the Educational Policy and Evaluation program. Her research interests focus on higher education access, equity, and inclusion.
Lindy Hamilton Mayled Arizona State University
Lindy Hamilton Mayled is a PhD candidate at Grand Canyon University. She is pursuing her PhD in Psychology of Learning, Education, and Technology. Her background in in K-12 education where she has served as a high school science teacher, Instructional and Curriculum Coach, and Assistant Principal. Her research and areas of interest are in improving STEM educational outcomes for Low-SES students through the integration of active learning and technology-enabled frequent feedback. She currently works as the Project Manager for the NSF faculty development program based on evidence-based teaching practices.
Elizabeth Lopez Arizona State University
Elizabeth Lopez is a Master’s student at Arizona State University studying biomedical engineering. She has undergone the undergraduate engineering curriculum and has facilitated the implementation of evidence-based instructional strategies in the biomedical senior design course. In JTFD, she has evaluated and analyzed the shift in instructor fidelity towards student-centered learning.
Yong Seok Park California State University Fullerton
Yong Seok Park is an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at California State University Fullerton. He earned his Master’s degree at George Washington University and his Doctorate at the Virginia Tech. Prior to joining California State Fullerton, Dr. Park was a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University. His research interests lie in undergraduate STEM education research and engineering design education.
Bethany B Smith University of California, Berkeley
Bethany Smith is currently pursuing her PhD in materials science and engineering at University of California, Berkeley. She has been involved in STEM education research since 2012 under the direction of Professor Stephen Krause. Her research interests in STEM education include faculty development, best classroom practices, and improving undergraduate engineering student retention through understanding what makes students leave engineering.
Abstract
For more effective teaching and learning in undergraduate engineering education, there is a strong need for faculty professional development to instruction 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) program has funded a large-scale faculty development program at a large southwestern university called Just-in-Time-Teaching with Two Way Formative Feedback for Multiple Disciplinary (JTFD) Programs. The project scales to seven engineering disciplines with 84 faculty using a train-the-trainer model to engage faculty in year-long apprenticeships with a semester of eight biweekly workshops followed by a semester of six biweekly mentor-supported classroom innovation implementation. Prior project research has shown that evidence-based practices such as student engagement, contextualization of content, and two-way formative feedback can improve student attitudes, achievement and persistence. Research also shows that changing faculty teaching beliefs toward evidence-based strategies and practices can be difficult, but the transition can be eased when disciplinary communities of practice support faculty while they are changing their beliefs and practices. The personal interactions that occur within and between the disciplinary communities of practice are being characterized in JTFD with social network analysis (SNA) and will be correlated to shifts, across time, in the beliefs and practice of the faculty toward student-centered instruction. Prior project SNA research has shown faculty who are socially better connected to one another also teach with more student-centered classroom practices, as found from classroom observations. This was assessed by a tool called Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) which has 25 items related to evidence based practice and is used by trained observers to assess classroom practice. Faculty beliefs and classroom practice are being assessed in JTFD with surveys, open0ended questions and classroom observations. Faculty motivation is being assessed with a new survey using expectancy-value theory. The impact of faculty changes in classroom practice on students is being assessed by changes in their persistence and achievement. Some preliminary results have been collected during the spring 2016 term from four pairs of disciplinary leader trainers who completed the eight workshops. One result showed that the effect of the eight workshops on faculty's student-centered classroom practice, as measured by RTOP, was an improvement between 34% and 65%. Another result showed that, for two faculty, compared to the same class for a prior semester, significant gains in the student grade ratio (the ratio of A's plus B's to C's plus D's plus E's plus W's). Thus, the cohort of eight faculty trained during the Spring 2016 semester shifted their practice significantly from teacher-centered instruction to student-centered learning as shown by the classroom observation RTOP results. Because of the limited number of participants other measures of change in faculty beliefs and motivation were positive, but did not show statistical significance. Future cohorts with larger numbers of participants can reveal correlations between faculty beliefs, motivation and classroom practice.
Krause, S. J., & Middleton, J. A., & Hjelmstad, K. D., & Judson, E., & Culbertson, R. J., & Ankeny, C. J., & Chen, Y., & Ross, L., & Mayled, L. H., & Lopez, E., & Park, Y. S., & Smith, B. B. (2017, June), Board #68 : Scaling a Faculty Professional Development Program to Multiple Disciplines through Disciplinary Communities of Practice Evolving from Evidence-Based Workshops Paper presented at 2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Columbus, Ohio. 10.18260/1-2--27973
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