Dissertation
Impacts of faculty development on Iinstruction of analytical chemistry faculty
University of Iowa
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
Summer 2021
DOI: 10.17077/etd.005963
Abstract
This work describes a faculty development project, including workshops and their revisions, and assesses the successfulness of the workshops, structure of participant implementation with follow-up observations, and the structure of the materials participants submitted. Participant engagement in the faculty development project began with a national workshop, where facilitators instructed participants on the nature of active learning, the benefits to students, and modeled examples of what active learning could look like. Then the participants received time to work on their own materials with ready access to the facilitators. The workshops wrapped up with time for participants to practice their implementation and receive feedback from other participants and facilitators. The participants then returned home to put what they learned and worked on into practice, and the facilitators worked with the research team to revise the workshop. The process repeated itself with a new cohort of participants, and a revision period. In all, five cohorts went through a version of the national workshop, with the last four receiving revised forms.
Looking at the workshops as a cohesive project, the results were undeniably successful. While each workshop built on the lessons of the ones that came before, the participants were almost universally enthusiastic about integrating active learning into their courses upon their return.
The next portion of the project was the follow up observation, where a facilitator visited the home institution of a participant and observed how the participant implemented active learning in their classroom. The facilitator completed a pair of observation protocols and then sat down with the participant to discuss the observation. The results of the protocols were evaluated, and the pedagogical style of the participant was grouped into one of three categories: didactic, interactive, or student-centered. Putting the observation follow-up in the greater context of the project, it helped to align the outcomes with the goal. As the goal for the participants was active instruction, ideally the observations would show student-centered styles. Much like the results of the workshops, the observations were almost universally a success, with almost all the observations being student-centered styles.
The last aspect evaluated for the project was the materials submitted by the participants. Participants were tasked with submitting any materials they created at regular intervals throughout the project: after the national workshop, at the end of every semester, and before the site visit observation. To determine the effectiveness of the materials submitted they first had to be evaluated for structure. Materials serve to support facilitation by giving students the chance to experience new concepts, guiding students from simple concepts to more complicated new concepts, and defining expectations. Great facilitation paired with materials that do not share a common point of view or goal often work at odds with each other.
Marzano's taxonomy allows for evaluating the structure of materials based on the complexity of the cognitive tasks that each question asks of a learner. However, modifications were needed to make it more easily applicable to chemistry contexts. This modified taxonomy was then applied to a subset of the materials submitted by participants. The materials were grouped into one of three categories based on the degree of scaffolding the materials possessed: poorly scaffolded, mixed scaffolding, well-scaffolded. Slightly more than half of the materials evaluated were poorly scaffolded, with the remainder being fairly evenly split between mixed scaffolding and well-scaffolded.
Looking at the project as a whole, the aspects that dealt with implementation were overwhelmingly successful, with participants adopting and implementing active pedagogies into their instruction. However, materials, which were less focused on in the workshops, were more inconsistently successful in terms of structure.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Impacts of faculty development on Iinstruction of analytical chemistry faculty
- Creators
- Ian Leo Brown
- Contributors
- Renée Cole (Advisor)Johna Leddy (Committee Member)Matthew Lira (Committee Member)Scott Shaw (Committee Member)Florence Williams (Committee Member)
- Resource Type
- Dissertation
- Degree Awarded
- Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), University of Iowa
- Degree in
- Chemistry
- Date degree season
- Summer 2021
- DOI
- 10.17077/etd.005963
- Publisher
- University of Iowa
- Number of pages
- xvii, 287 pages
- Copyright
- Copyright 2021 Ian Leo Brown
- Language
- English
- Description illustrations
- color illustrations
- Description bibliographic
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 113-117).
- Public Abstract (ETD)
Teaching practices that actively engage students with content have been shown to improve student outcomes as opposed to more passive practices like traditional lecture. However, such active learning in chemistry courses is still relatively uncommon. This indicates a need for better training and support for chemistry instructors.
This work describes a faculty development project for analytical chemistry instructors that aimed to change the participants' instruction to incorporate more active learning strategies. The project included workshops where participants learned about different types of active learning and how to incorporate it into their classrooms. After the workshops, participants used what they learned and created new materials for their students. The instructors were observed, and the materials they created were collected for analysis.
Materials that scale up in difficulty too quickly can cause students to become stuck and unable to continue without substantial assistance, while materials that carefully build in complexity can provide students tools to tackle more complex questions. On the other hand, materials that never ask questions that require students to form new ideas are straightforward for students to complete but are unlikely to help students acquire a deeper understanding of concepts. A new tool was created to categorize the materials created based on their structure and was used to determine both the complexity of each question and the overall structure of the materials.
This work describes a successful faculty development program, including workshop design, results from the observations showing successful participant implementation, and the characterization of participant materials showing inconsistent design.
- Academic Unit
- Chemistry
- Record Identifier
- 9984124171202771
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