CHARACTERIZING THE TEACHING BELIEFS OF FUTURE GEOSCIENCE PROFESSORS

Student-centered teaching practices have been shown to increase student learning and retention in geoscience courses. The pedagogical beliefs of instructors impact the integration of these practices into geoscience courses. Today’s PhD students and post-doctoral fellows represent the next generation of professors, but research on their pedagogical beliefs is lacking. The goal of this study is to characterize the teaching beliefs of this population of future geoscience instructors. The Beliefs about Reformed Teaching and Learning (BARSTL) survey was administered to 47 geoscience PhD students and post-docs from various institutions across the U.S. The BARSTL is a 32-item Likert-type questionnaire designed to determine how aligned an instructor’s pedagogical beliefs are to reformed-based teaching of science. Possible BARSTL scores range from 32 to 128 points, with higher scores reflecting reformed, student-centered beliefs. The average BARSTL score of the study population was 84.5, with a minimum of 77 and maximum of 96. Compared with BARSTL scores for instructors, our population has a similar minimum but lower maximum for a smaller range and lower average.

Some professional development experiences have been shown to contribute to a shift from traditional teacher-centered beliefs to a more student-centered pedagogy. We administered the BARSTL to 42 members of the study population again after attending the Preparing for a Future Career in the Geosciences workshop as part of the On the Cutting Edge professional development program. The workshop’s goals were for participants to become more effective teachers, better prepared future faculty members, and stronger candidates for academic jobs. Participants could have spent as much as a third of the 3.5 day workshop focused on some aspect of the teaching process (e.g., writing a teaching philosophy statement, presentations on student engagement). Examination of pre- and post-workshop BARSTL scores do not reveal a significant difference (p = .074). A subset of this population (n=21) were also interviewed using the Teacher Beliefs Interview (TBI), a semi-structured interview with coding maps designed to capture the epistemological beliefs of teachers. We will compare and contrast pre- and post-workshop BARSTL and TBI scores as a result of attending the workshop.