EVALUATING THE TEACHING BELIEFS AND PRACTICES OF GEOSCIENCE FACULTY

The beliefs that college faculty hold about teaching and learning influence their instructional practice and their perception of various student outcomes within the classroom. In turn, their teaching beliefs can be influenced by the classroom practices they use, the outcomes resulting from their practice, and their interaction with external sources such as colleagues, research literature, or professional development experiences. We administered the Teacher Beliefs Interview (TBI) to a group of 20 geoscience faculty from a range of institutions within the US. The TBI is a seven question, semi-structured interview with a coding protocol that classifies each of the seven responses on a five point scale from Traditional to Reformed, and the entire interview can be scored from 7-35. In addition, to sample the teaching practices used by these faculty, we utilized the Teaching Practices Inventory (TPI). The TPI has eight categories that survey a wide range of teaching practices including learning goals, amount of lecturing, in-class activities, homework assignments, metacognitive activities, and collaboration with colleagues. It is scored using a rubric that assigns 0-3 points to each practice used based on the amount of research supporting its impact on student learning, with a maximum score of 67. Initial studies using classroom observations have shown the TPI to be reliably indicative of the classroom practices utilized by instructors. Scores on both the TPI and TBI were correlated to determine how well an instructor’s beliefs and practices were reflective of each other. We will compare our data to that collected in previous studies and discuss possible implications for guiding professional development programs from the instruments used and data collected.