EXPERIENCES INFLUENCING THE DEVELOPMENT OF REFORMED TEACHING BELIEFS AMONG FUTURE GEOSCIENCE PROFESSORS

Recent research reveals fifty-seven percent of PhD students stay in academia after graduation (Zolas et al., 2015). This statistic indicates many current graduate students will soon be responsible for teaching college courses. The pedagogical beliefs of instructors impact how they structure their courses and whether they choose to use research-validated teaching methods proven to improve student learning. How can we promote the development of reformed teaching beliefs among today’s graduate students who will become tomorrow’s professors?

This longitudinal research follows a broad population of geoscience graduate students and post-docs over a 12 to 18 month period to evaluate changes in teaching beliefs and to determine the significance of experiences such as participation in teaching-related professional development or serving as a teaching assistant. The Beliefs about Reformed Teaching and Learning (BARSTL) survey was administered to 609 geoscience graduate students and post-docs from various institutions across the US in year one. In year two, the BARSTL was re-administered to 308 of prior participants (51% of original population). 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. In addition, ten percent of the initial population (n=60) were interviewed during year one using the Teacher Belief Interview (TBI), a semi-structured interview with coding maps designed to capture the epistemological beliefs of teachers. Half (31) of these participants were re-interviewed in year two (52% of original population). The TBI allows for in-depth exploration of participants’ teaching beliefs.

BARSTL results show that participation in any professional development related to teaching beyond a short, required teaching assistant orientation has a statistically significant (p=0.01) impact on participants’ teaching beliefs. Participants who took part in semester-long professional development experienced a statistically significant shift in TBI score toward more reformed beliefs (p=0.02). We will present the findings of this study to suggest how we can best prepare our graduate students and post-docs for success in future careers.