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2016 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Work in Progress: Measuring Dispositions Toward Teaching Strategies and Their Reported Use

Presented at Works in Progress: Faculty Perspectives and Training

This work-in-progress study began with a desire to evaluate attitudes held by engineering instructors participating in an NSF-funded IUSE project. Although instruments exist to broadly evaluate viewpoints toward student engagement (e.g., Approaches to Teaching Inventory) and to directly observe classroom interactions, few aid evaluating attitudes toward integrating specific student-centered strategies. Rather than evaluate attitudes toward expansive concepts such as constructivism or inquiry, the team focused on three concrete strategies:

1. Formative feedback
2. Integrating real-world applications
3. Facilitating student-to-student discussion

Guided by expectancy theory research, it was understood that decisions to initiate or expand the use of a classroom strategy is related to (1) perceived value for both students and self, (2) expectation of success, and (3) perceived implementation costs (e.g., time, materials). Following an established instrument development model and multiple iterations the team produced the Value, Expectancy, and Cost of Testing Educational Reforms Survey (VECTERS). In addition to course and demographic information, VECTERS contains 11 value items, 10 expectancy items, and 5 cost items. For each item, respondents provide three responses indicating dispositions on Likert scales for the three strategies listed above.

All engineering faculty members at 19 large colleges of engineering were invited via email to complete VECTERS online. A total of 286 responses were received. While it is understood that those who volunteered to complete the VECTERS may be a skewed sample of individuals interested in engineering education, the large sample and variation in responses was sufficient to test internal consistency reliability and conduct factor analysis.

The internal consistency for VECTERS items was high (Cronbach’s α = .90). Because VECTERS can be considered as three sub-instruments, comprised of 26 items separately addressing the three classroom strategies, VECTERS was accordingly examined. Cronbach’s alpha values for formative feedback, real-world applications, and student-to-student discussion (0.83, 0.76, 0.82, respectively) were all above 0.7 thus implying acceptable reliability for understanding patterns across groups.

Exploratory factor analysis was conducted using orthogonal (varimax) rotation. Analysis was applied to VECTERS' three sub-tests (formative feedback, real-world applications, and student-to-student discussion). Five to six factors were retained that were roughly parallel among all three analyses. The factors accounted for 60% (formative feedback), 55% (real-world applications), and 62% (student-to-student discussion) of the variance. Items loading heavily on the first factor for formative feedback and real-world applications, and on the second factor for student-to-student interactions, were similar; those items were mostly expectancy items indicating the strategy was expected to be successful due to student ability. For student-to-student interactions, items loading heaviest on the first factor were all value items – indicating perceived value for students when integrating the strategy. All of the cost items, except for the cost of time, comprised either the second factor (real-world applications) or third factor (formative feedback and student-to-student discussion). in sum, VECTERS has potential as a research-based tool enabling examination of rationale behind the implementation of classroom strategies.

Authors
  1. Dr. Eugene Judson Orcid 16x16http://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 1600 times and his publications have been published in multiple peer-reviewed journals such as Science Education and the Journal of Research in Science Teaching.

  2. Lydia Ross Arizona State University
  3. 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.

  4. 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 interests include evaluating conceptual knowledge, misconceptions and technologies to promote conceptual change. He has co-developed a Materials Concept Inventory and a Chemistry Concept Inventory for assessing conceptual knowledge and change for introductory materials science and chemistry classes. He is currently conducting research on NSF projects in two areas. One is studying how strategies of engagement and feedback with support from internet tools and resources affect conceptual change and associated impact on students' attitude, achievement, and persistence. The other is on the factors that promote persistence and success in retention of undergraduate students in engineering. He was a coauthor for best paper award in the Journal of Engineering Education in 2013.

  5. Dr. Casey Jane Ankeny Northwestern University [biography]

    Casey J. Ankeny, PhD is an Assistant Professor of Instruction at Northwestern University. Casey received her bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Virginia in 2006 and her doctorate degree in Biomedical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University in 2012 where she studied the role of shear stress in aortic valve disease. Currently, she is investigating cyber-based student engagement strategies in flipped and traditional biomedical engineering courses. She aspires to understand and improve student attitude, achievement, and persistence in student-centered courses.

  6. 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.

  7. Prof. Robert J. Culbertson Arizona State University [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.

  8. Prof. Keith D. Hjelmstad Arizona State University [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.

  9. 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.

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