Teaching and Instruction of Faculty in Higher Education

Abstract

Within higher education at Research 1 (R1) institutions, there are a variety of different roles and positions within the university. In particular, faculty at an R1 school vary from having independent roles (such as tenure track positions, emeritus roles, and practitioner or educator positions) to mentored or sponsored roles (such as non-tenure track teaching or research positions and post-doctoral fellowships). Each subset of faculty roles contains areas of challenges and areas of opportunity. Of those faculty positions, careers that educate both undergraduate and graduate student populations in STEM are being pushed by many agencies to improve the quality of education to allow for increased student successes. Our Chemical and Environmental Engineering Department managed to improve the retention of chemical engineers from 45% to roughly 90% over the span of a few years. The overarching research question this dissertation will address is how we can continue to improve the teaching of faculty members and spread the successes in the department to other disciplines. As the Association of American Universities would suggest, this dissertation will approach this retention success from the focal point of the instructor. Instructors encounter many challenges when teaching or incorporating change in their practices. An abbreviated list of different challenges across teaching include: developing ways to promote higher order thinking, understanding the nature of group or team assignments, having an appropriate depth of content knowledge, disseminating curricula and pedagogy, developing reflective teaching and questioning personal beliefs, use of information communication and technologies, relations and adoption of professional communities, utilizing different teaching structures, such as using student learning initiatives, and adopting evidence-based teaching practices, such as using an interactive classroom. With a plethora of different areas to spend time on, this dissertation will focus on: 1. Providing a manual of scalable instructional techniques for student retention which helped increase retention dramatically. 2. Qualitatively characterizing affective drivers that promote change in teaching practice to help instructors and professional development facilitators improve instruction 3. Assessing gender biases of students on teacher course evaluations in higher education to ensure there is equality towards instructors in terms of gender. In essence, the perspective of the chapters looks at higher education from different viewpoints. This dissertation will have five main parts: 1) an introduction to the state of higher education from a broad perspective, 2) scalable and practice interventions faculty can deploy to increase retention and improve teaching practices from a teaching perspective, 3) an in-depth look at one instructor’s affective factors to her teaching practices from a professional development perspective, 4) a look as potential gender biases in higher education as females may be discriminated against in end-of-semester reviews in a male dominated field giving insight from the student perspective, and 5) a look at the future of teaching faculty in higher education from a broader perspective on higher education. Below are a list of the chapters found in the dissertation: Chapter 1 - The Current State of Higher Education Chapter 2 - Scalable and Practical Interventions Faculty Can Deploy to Increase Retention: A Faculty Cookbook for Increasing Student Success Chapter 3 - Affective Factors that Influence the Implementation of Task vs. Lecture in a Large Introductory General Chemistry Course Chapter 4 - Student Evaluation of Teaching in an Engineering Class and Comparison of Results Based on Instructor Gender Chapter 5 – The Future of Teaching Faculty in Higher Education