2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Faculty Characteristics that Influence Student Performance in the First Two Years of Engineering

Presented at NSF Grantees Poster Session I

This is an evidence-based paper based on research that has shown that faculty beliefs influence their classroom practices and that reformed teaching methods like engagement teaching improve student performance and retention in STEM fields. To better understand the relationships between faculty beliefs and practice and student outcomes like performance and attitudes, this research implemented three tools. The first tool is a 24 question guided interview to gauge general beliefs towards teaching; the second is the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI) that measures faculty beliefs towards instructor-centered knowledge transmission and instructor-centered strategies versus student-centered conceptual change intention and strategies. The third is the Reformed Teaching Observational Protocol (RTOP) which is a protocol that quantitatively measures degree of student-centered classroom behaviors. By combining ATI and RTOP scores with emergent theme (ET) analysis on relevant interview questions, faculty characteristics influencing student outcomes can be determined. This work addressees the research questions, “What is the relationship between faculty beliefs and practice?” and “What is the relationship between faculty practice and student outcomes?”

30 faculty members that teach freshman or sophomore level engineering courses at a large, southwestern university were interviewed about their teaching beliefs, were surveyed using the ATI, and were observed using the RTOP. Interview questions were analyzed using emergent theme analysis and related to their ATI responses and RTOP scores. The interview question responses were coded numerically as either teacher-centered (-1), student centered (+1), or mixed/neither (0) using the dimensions of the ATI as a basis. The total RTOP scores, the ATI dimension scores, and the sum of the interview ET analyses for every faculty member were then ranked in ascending order. Using Spearman’s rank correlation, the relationships between the ATI, RTOP, and ET analysis were found. We found that 2 of the 4 dimensions of the ATI were correlated to the ET analysis at the 90% confidence level and that teacher practice was related to ATI. Finally, we examined the grade distributions for the classes that we observed, correlated them to teacher practice, and found that the ratio of the grades ABC to DEW and ABC to DE was higher for the instructors with higher RTOP scores than for instructors with lower RTOP scores. The findings of this study indicate that faculty beliefs and practices are related and that they relate to student performance. It follows that by shifting the beliefs of faculty members towards student-centeredness, there would likely be a positive change in student outcomes.

Authors

Ms. Bethany B Smith Arizona State University [biography]

Bethany Smith is currently a master’s student in materials science and engineering at Arizona State University. She has been involved in STEM education research since 2012 under the direction of Professor Stephen Krause. Her research interests in STEM education include faculty development, best classroom practices, and improving undergraduate engineering student retention through understanding what makes students leave engineering. She will be pursuing her PhD in Materials Science and Engineering starting in 2016 at the University of California Berkeley.
Dr. Yong Seok Park Arizona State University [biography]

Yong Seok Park is an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at California State University Fullerton. He earned his Master’s degree at George Washington University and his Doctorate at the Virginia Tech. Prior to joining California State Fullerton, Dr. Park was a postdoctoral research associate at Arizona State University. His research interests lie in undergraduate STEM education research and engineering design education.
Lydia Ross Arizona State University [biography]

Dr. Lydia Ross is a clinical assistant professor in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College. She also serves as the executive director of the Association for Education Finance & Policy. She holds a PhD in Educational Policy and Evaluation from Arizona State University. Her research focuses on equity and access and in higher education, with a focus on STEM.
Prof. Stephen J Krause Arizona State University [biography]

Stephen Krause is professor in the Materials Science Program in the Fulton School of Engineering at Arizona State University. He teaches in the areas of introductory materials engineering, polymers and composites, and capstone design. His research interes
Dr. Ying-Chih Chen Arizona State University [biography]

Ying-Chih Chen is an assistant professor in the Division of Teacher Preparation at Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona.

His research takes two distinct but interrelated paths focused on elementary students’ learning in science and engineering as well as in-service science teachers’ professional development. The first focus involves how language as a learning tool improves students’ conceptual understandings, literacy, and representation competencies in science. His second research focus is on how in-service teachers develop their knowledge for teaching science and engineering in argument-based inquiry classrooms. This research is aimed at developing measures of teachers’ Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) for adopting the argument-based inquiry approach, as well as developing tools to capture the interactive nature of PCK.
Prof. James A Middleton Arizona State University [biography]

James A. Middleton is Professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and Director of the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering, and Technology at Arizona State University. For the last three years he also held the Elmhurst Energy Chair in STEM education at the University of Birmingham in the UK. Previously, Dr. Middleton was Associate Dean for Research in the Mary Lou Fulton College of Education at Arizona State University, and Director of the Division of Curriculum and Instruction. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1992, where he also served in the National Center for Research on Mathematical Sciences Education as a postdoctoral scholar.
Dr. Eugene Judson http://orcid.org/https://0000-0002-0124-8476 Arizona State University [biography]

Eugene Judson is an Associate Professor of for the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College at Arizona State University. His past experiences include having been a middle school science teacher, Director of Academic and Instructional Support for the Arizona Department of Education, a research scientist for the Center for Research on Education in Science, Mathematics, Engineering and Technology (CRESMET), and an evaluator for several NSF projects. His first research strand concentrates on the relationship between educational policy and STEM education. His second research strand focuses on studying STEM classroom interactions and subsequent effects on student understanding. He is a co-developer of the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) and his work has been cited more than 1500 times and his publications have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals such as Science Education and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.
Prof. Robert J Culbertson [biography]

Robert J. Culbertson is an Associate Professor of Physics. Currently, he teaches introductory mechanics and electrodynamics for physics majors and a course in musical acoustics, which was specifically designed for elementary education majors. He is director of the ASU Physics Teacher Education Coalition (PhysTEC) Project, which strives to produce more and better high school physics teachers. He is also director of Master of Natural Science degree program, a graduate program designed for in-service science teachers. He works on improving persistence of students in STEM majors, especially under-prepared students and students from under-represented groups.
Dr. Casey Jane Ankeny Northwestern University [biography]

Casey J. Ankeny, PhD is an Associate Professor of Instruction and Director of MS Program at Northwestern University.
Prof. Keith D. Hjelmstad Arizona State University, Polytechnic campus [biography]

Keith D. Hjelmstad is President's Professor of Civil Engineering in the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment at Arizona State University.
Dr. Claire Y. Yan University of British Columbia, Okanagan [biography]

Dr. Claire Y. Yan is a senior instructor in the School of Engineering, University of British Columbia, Okanaga. She received her B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Xi'an Jiaotong University, China and Ph.D. degree from University of Strathclyde, UK. Prior to joining UBC in 2008, she worked as a research scientist at Ryerson University on various projects in the area of CFD and heat and mass transfer. Dr. Yan has taught a variety of courses including fluid mechanics, fluid machines, mechanics of materials, calculus, and kinematics and dynamic. She has also developed undergraduate fluids laboratories and supervised many capstone projects. Her interest in SoTL is evidence-based teaching strategies, student engagement, faculty development, and teaching and learning communities. Dr. Yan is a registered P.Eng. with APEGBC and has served as reviewer for various international journals.

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