ON-LINE TEACHING RESOURCES IMPROVE FACULTY TEACHING

The SERC website hosts a wide variety of teaching resources derived primarily from the work of over federally funded grants. Do faculty who use these resources report more effective teaching practices? If so, what explains the effect? To answer these questions, we used data from the National Survey of Geoscience Faculty administered in 2004, 2009, 2012, and 2016. Hierarchical regression analyses indicated that SERC website use positively predicted respondents' estimates of the percentage of class time spent using student-centered teaching strategies. This relationship was statistically significant for both introductory courses and majors courses, even after controlling for the effects of faculty members’ levels of participation in SERC-affiliated webinars and workshops. SERC website use also positively predicted respondents’ use of small group discussion and in-class teaching activities and negatively predicted use of traditional lecture.

Based on research on the impact of training on work performance (Kirwan an Birchall 2006), we hypothesized that website use might improve teaching both directly (i.e., by providing faculty access to high-quality materials) and indirectly (i.e., by facilitating faculty conversations). We used multiple mediation analyses (Preacher and Hayes 2008) to test this model. Analyses show that that the positive association between website use and use of student-centered teaching strategies is partially direct and partially explained by increased interactions with colleagues about course content and teaching methods. This dual role of the online resources is supported by other evidence including faculty members’ self-reports of the impact of the online resources as assessed on the national survey and in 30 interviews; their self-reports of the range of uses for their professional career on a 2 minute survey administered by the Compass project in 2022; and by faculty members’ actual use of the SERC website as assessed by analytics.

Together, these results indicate that access to SERC online resource collections has an impact on teaching practices that is independent of and complementary to participation in workshops and webinars. This impact may be attributable to the design of the materials to support transfer of learning as well as the choice of faculty peers as authors.