To the choir: Forward-thinking faculty sharing innovations mostly among themselves
Study suggests faculty networks not enough to spread evidence-based
practices

Date:
August 31, 2020
Source:
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Summary:
Surveys and network analyses of 192 STEM faculty at three
universities revealed that frequent users of evidence-based
instructional practices are far more likely to engage one another
than colleagues less familiar with the practices. The finding
suggests that faculty networks alone are not enough to disseminate
and drive the adoption of evidence-based practices that could
improve undergraduate instruction and address inequities for
students historically underserved by STEM classrooms.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Eager to learn the latest in instructional practices that research says
will better engage and educate her students, an assistant professor of biochemistry attends a virtual workshop devoted to exactly that.


==========================================================================
A seminal theory proposed in the mid-20th century would suggest that she,
as an early adopter of the innovations, might share them with fellow
faculty in her department, maybe in her college, possibly even across
her university. New research published in Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences indicates that she will, too -- but probably just
with the choir of faculty who are already practicing what she's preaching.

Surveys and network analyses of 192 STEM faculty at the University of
Nebraska- Lincoln, University of South Florida and Boise State University revealed that frequent users of evidence-based instructional practices
are far more likely to engage one another than colleagues less familiar
with the practices.

The finding suggests that faculty networks alone are not enough to
disseminate and drive the adoption of evidence-based practices that could improve undergraduate instruction and address inequities for students historically underserved by STEM classrooms.

"The idea has been that you could spread knowledge by capturing a smaller
group of people, and that would then propagate out from that small group
to the larger department," said Brian Couch, associate professor of
biological sciences at Nebraska. "But if we're thinking of these people
as having specialized knowledge that would be of value to the rest of
the department, then the existing social structure is not providing
robust channels for that information to be spread.

"It's really allowing those high users to reflect and learn from each
other, but there's not a lot of evidence that the information is getting outside of that group." Led by the University of Minnesota's Kelly
Lane, South Florida's Luanna Prevost, the University of Virginia's
Marilyne Stains and Couch, the research team also conducted in-depth
interviews with 19 of the STEM faculty who reported regularly using evidence-based practices in the classroom. When explaining how they
decide which colleagues to engage in teaching discussions, 58% of the interviewees said they seek out peers with similar teaching values,
and 37% cited expertise or experience as a reason to reach out. Just 5%
said they engage colleagues specifically because those colleagues conduct similar research or have similar faculty appointments.



==========================================================================
"The categories that seemed to be driving interactions between people
were more about values and expertise -- things that people might have regardless of where they're teaching or what they're teaching -- whereas
the categories that weren't as highly cited were more structural or could
be assigned to a faculty member," Couch said. "So it was really more
about shared philosophy rather than obligations or other happenstance
reasons that they'd be connected to each other." Numerous instructional practices have held up to rigorous evaluation across dozens or even
hundreds of studies throughout recent years, Couch said, making them
among the most proven and promising ways to support learning in STEM classrooms. Chief among those are active-learning strategies that
eschew or demote traditional lecturing in favor of organizing students
into groups, asking those groups to answer relevant questions, then
having them discuss and share the thought processes that yielded those
answers. Another well-supported practice, just-in-time teaching, involves adapting instruction on a week-to- week or even class-to-class basis,
depending on how students answer curriculum- specific questions posed
prior to classes.

Some of those practices appear to especially improve outcomes for underrepresented and underserved populations, including students of color, first-generation students, and those from low-income backgrounds.

"The excitement behind them, and the reason a lot of different agencies
and institutions are trying to promote their use, is because we know
there are deficiencies in education -- that business as usual produces
outcomes that are lower than we would want, that are inequitable in
different ways for different groups," Couch said. "So finding teaching practices that can help address some of those issues is valuable."
But finding those teaching practices means little without also figuring
out how to increase their implementation in higher education, said the researchers, who proposed several ways to do it. One of them -- prompting conversations by asking two or more faculty to co-teach a course --
is especially appealing because many institutions are familiar with it
and already incorporating it to some extent.



========================================================================== "Many departments have an introductory course series with different
faculty teaching different sections, and there has to be some level of coordination across those sections," Couch said. "That's a place where
people have cause to talk. And maybe with a little more deliberateness
and intentionality around those teams and those relationships, we can
start to engage broader faculty in conversations. That feels like an
area that is ripe for advancement and maybe just needs a little more follow-through." Another potential solution: incentivizing the adoption
of evidence-based practices to a degree that they simply are not at most institutions, the researchers said. That lagging incentive structure
might help explain why the diffusion of innovation theory, which often
captures the dissemination of technologies whose benefits are obvious
and immediate, fails to do the same for instructional practices.

Given that institutional and departmental leaders influence the hiring, promotion and evaluation of faculty, along with the allocation of
resources, the researchers said those leaders also have the power to make evidence-based practices a larger priority on campuses. Establishing or changing a culture of teaching in less direct ways could likewise go a
long way, the team said.

"We know that leaders have a strong voice in where people are teaching
and what they're teaching and what types of expectations are on those teaching," Couch said. "Those leaders, as they're thinking about teaching assignments, mentoring networks, junior faculty and so on, can be really deliberate about how to find structures that would keep people engaged
-- to maintain cohesiveness and not let the nodes in the network get
too dispersed.

"We need to be thinking about these alternative ways of engaging faculty
and helping them develop their teaching through their relationships,
rather than just incentives that they would receive or not receive
based on some outcome." The good news? Just as research has shown
the need to facilitate conversations between faculty who do and don't
use evidence-based practices, it also suggests that the faculty who do
converse are both better for it, Couch said.

"What's neat about it is: If a low user and a high user talk to each
other, it's not that the low user becomes more like high user, and a high
user becomes more like a low user," he said. "What we actually see is that
both of them can shift together in the same direction. There appears to
be an influence of who you talk to, and that influence can be positive
for both parties." Lane, Prevost, Stains and Couch authored the study
with South Florida's Jacob McAlpin, Stephanie Feola, Jennifer Lewis and
John Skvoretz, along with Boise State's Brittnee Earl, Karl Mertens,
Susan Shadle and John Ziker.

The researchers received support from the National Science Foundation
and NebraskaSCIENCE.


========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_Nebraska-Lincoln. Original written by Scott Schrage. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. A. Kelly Lane, Jacob D. McAlpin, Brittnee Earl, Stephanie Feola,
Jennifer
E. Lewis, Karl Mertens, Susan E. Shadle, John Skvoretz,
John P. Ziker, Brian A. Couch, Luanna B. Prevost, and Marilyne
Stains. Innovative teaching knowledge stays with users. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences, Aug. 31, 2020; DOI:
10.1073/pnas.2012372117 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200831154412.htm

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