Abstract
Effective teaching professional development plays an important role in ensuring good learning outcomes for students and in the overall quality of universities’ educational programs. This quality impacts student dropout rates and the ability of universities to meet the growing demand for graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. However, access to effective professional training is often lacking or basic (Gosling, 2009). Instructors in science faculties are typically experts in their discipline and well trained for their work as researchers, but in their roles as teachers, they often do not experience equally thorough and professional preparation. Building on the tremendous growth in knowledge from both cognitive science with regards to how we learn and from educational science about evidence-based, highly effective teaching strategies and professional development practices, we developed and evaluated a professional development course, Teaching Science at University (TSU), to address this gap.
Our choices to make the course specific to the discipline of science and the context of higher education are based upon research suggesting teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) plays a key role in student learning (e.g., Coe et al., 2014; Hattie, 2009; Kunter et al., 2013) and is best developed through PCK-focused professional development (Kleickmann et al., 2017). PCK is a specialized form of knowledge for teaching with which instructors transform their own understanding of the subject matter into a form that is comprehensible to others (Shulman, 1986). Relevant to the scope of this dissertation, PCK includes knowing what topics are difficult to learn, considering students’ prior knowledge and the preconceptions they might bring to a lesson, and choosing the most useful representations for a subject (such as analogies) (e.g., Mavhunga & Rollnick, 2013; Shulman, 1986).
The specific aims of this dissertation were to design a professional development course focused on enhancing the PCK of early-career scientists and to evaluate the impact of the course. We asked: How does a PCK-oriented course on teaching science in higher education influence the professional development of science instructors? We developed TSU through iterative cycles of design-based research, and the course has been running in two formats since 2016: a Massive Open Online Course on the platform Coursera and a blended course taught at our university. Using qualitative content analysis, we analyzed participant assignments in the conceptual change and analogies modules of the course. We also conducted a pre- and post-course survey to detect changes in participants’ beliefs about effective university teaching.
We found that course participants’ use of TSU’s structured teaching guides resulted in teaching plans that demonstrated PCK and aligned well with evidence on pedagogical best practices. In the conceptual change assignment, participants were able to tailor teaching ideas to students’ levels of preexisting knowledge. In the analogies assignments, participants were able to use everyday experiences to give cognitive access to abstract, intangible target science concepts. This indicated an awareness of what makes topics difficult to learn and the ability to choose adequate representations for teaching those difficult topics. Additional results showed that participants showed appreciation for the need to plan instructional analogies in advance and to include student discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of the analogy. Another noteworthy result was that 40% of the analogy teaching plans contained student learning tasks that required higher-order thinking, which is significant as there were no specific task prompts to do so. In the post-course survey, we also found significant shifts in the value participants assigned to the student-centered teaching strategies: giving feedback, asking about prior learning, and activating student interest.
Contributions to this dissertation include support for discipline-specific professional development as a means of developing the PCK of university science instructors, especially PCK related to student-centered teaching, and support for the use of structured guides for assisting novice instructors in their formulation of teaching plans. Furthermore, as the guides we used were originally developed for the K12 context, our findings suggest that resources from the K12 context can be useful in higher education. Finally, we show how participants’ PCK development can be identified through analysis of their teaching plans.
Petchey, Sara