This two-phased project is guiding efforts to encourage the use of research-based teaching strategies in college-level physics instruction. The project is studying the instructional change process in general, identifying barriers to change, and identifying change affordances. The goal of the first phase is to observe the change process as it happens. A five-semester longitudinal study of fifteen faculty who have participated in the NSF-supported Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop and who have indicated a willingness to engage in instructional change is being conducted. This study allows the examination of changes in instructional beliefs and practices as they happen in actual course settings over an extended period of time. Data include faculty interviews conducted at the beginning and end of each semester, surveys of the faculty conducted every three weeks throughout the semester, and teaching artifacts. For the study's second phase, all faculty who have participated in the New Faculty Workshop for the past five years are being surveyed. This second faculty cohort provides the study with a range of participants - from those who have just experienced the workshop to those who have had significant time to incorporate and reflect on their workshop experiences and to seek additional information about instructional innovations. The second study focuses on testing ideas generated as a result of the longitudinal study and on generating more generalized results because of the larger sample size.
This was a two-phased research study. The first phase was a five-semester longitudinal study involving fifteen participants from the summer 2010 Physics and Astronomy New Faculty Workshop (NFW). The second phase was a web survey of NFW participants. The survey was administered in Spring 2013 to all 1306 NFW participants (from 1996-2012) and had a response rate of 40%. This study confirmed prior work which indicated that the NFW professional development model significantly increases participants’ knowledge of and attitudes towards research-based teaching methods and motivates participants to implement changes in their teaching. Implementation results, though, were mixed. Many respondents reported not feeling that implementation was going well and many felt discouraged that students were responding unfavorably. All participants reported modifying their instruction to address difficulties. In some cases this meant a decrease in use of 'new' teaching methods. Thus, it is likely that additional support is required to help participants more successfully overcome common implementation challenges. The main implementation challenges were identified to be:1) students complained about new instruction, 2) students would not engage, 3) colleagues question new instruction, 4) local teaching environment was traditional, 5) physical environment made implementation of new instruction challenging (e.g., poorly designed rooms for interactive engagement), 6) Implementation did not go well, 7) lack of sufficient support resources from the Physics Education Research community (e.g., available resources too time consuming or difficult to navigate, lack understanding of how to use and interpret assessment instruments, lack information about how to overcome common implementation difficulties) The main implementation affordances were identified to be: 1) students responded favorably to the new instruction, 2) students would engage, 3) new instruction was valued by local colleagues, 4) local colleagues were also using research-based teaching strategies, 5) physical environments supported implementation (i.e. rooms with whiteboards, availability of clickers, etc.), 6) products from the Physics Education Research community support implementation (e.g., availability of curricular materials, websites such as Compadre, assessment instruments, etc.). In addition to directly influencing teaching in the introductory courses, the majority of faculty who teach upper level courses report adapting ideas learned in the NFW for introductory level courses in their upper level courses. Also, the majority of faculty report they have impacted their colleagues teaching as a result of their attendance at the NFW through discussions with those colleagues. This evidence of the spread of ideas across contexts and people is highly encouraging.
