![]() For example, it has been used to evaluate university-level courses at several different institutions to measure the effectiveness of faculty professional development workshops ( Ebert-May et al., 2011) and to compare physics instructors in a study examining coteaching as a method to help new faculty develop learner-centered teaching practices ( Henderson et al., 2011). The RTOP in particular has been used to observe university STEM instruction. These protocols consist of statements that observers typically score on a Likert scale from “not at all” to “to a great extent” and contain such statements as: “The teacher had a solid grasp of the subject matter content inherent in the lesson” (from RTOP Sawada et al., 2002). ![]() Examples of such protocols include the Inside the Classroom: Observation and Analytic Protocol ( Weiss et al., 2003) and the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP Sawada et al., 2002). Often, these protocols ask observers to make judgments about how well the teaching conforms to a specific standard. Although responses to these types of questions can provide useful feedback to observers and instructors, the data are observer dependent and cannot easily be standardized or compared across multiple classrooms (e.g., all STEM courses at UBC or UMaine).Īlternatively, structured protocols provide a common set of statements or codes to which the observers respond. When observers use open-ended protocols, they typically attend class, make notes, and respond to such statements as: “Comment on student involvement and interaction with the instructor” (Millis, 1992). The observation protocols considered were divided into two categories: open-ended or structured. In the quest for a suitable observation protocol, multiple existing options were considered, and ultimately rejected. A critical requirement of the protocol was that observers who were typical STEM faculty members could achieve those results with only 1 or 2 hours of training, as it is unrealistic to expect they would have more time than that available. To achieve these goals, the programs needed an observation protocol that could be used by faculty member observers to reliably characterize how students and instructors were spending their time in undergraduate STEM classrooms. The results of such observations were needed to: 1) characterize the general state of STEM classroom teaching at both institutions, 2) provide feedback to instructors who desired information about how they and their students were spending time in class, 3) identify faculty professional development needs, and 4) check the accuracy of the faculty reporting on the Teaching Practices Survey that is now in use at UBC (CWSEI Teaching Practices Survey, 2013). To collect information about the nature of STEM teaching practices as a means to support institutional change, faculty at both the University of British Columbia (UBC) and the University of Maine (UMaine) created classroom observation programs. This lack of information is a major barrier to transforming instruction and evaluating the success of programs that support such change. Given these compelling, evidence-based recommendations and the recognized need for measures of teaching effectiveness beyond student evaluations ( Association of American Universities, 2011), higher education institutions are struggling to determine the extent to which faculty members are teaching in an interactive manner. ![]() As a result, the importance of teaching science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses more effectively has been stressed in numerous reports, including the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology Engage to Excel report ( 2012), the National Science Foundation/American Association for the Advancement of Science Vision and Change report ( AAAS, 2010), and the National Research Council Discipline-Based Education Research report ( Singer et al., 2012). A large and growing body of research indicates that undergraduate students learn more in courses that use active-engagement instructional approaches ( Prince, 2004 Knight and Wood, 2005 Michael, 2006 Blanchard et al., 2010).
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