DISCUSSION AND SUMMARY
COPUS was developed because university observation programs needed a protocol to: 1) characterize the general state of teaching, 2) provide feedback to instructors who desired information about how they and their students were spending class time, and 3) identify faculty professional development needs. COPUS meets all of these goals by allowing observers with little observation protocol training and experience to reliably characterize what both faculty and students are doing in a classroom.
There are several uses for COPUS data. On an individual level, faculty members can receive pie charts with their code prevalence results (examples in Figure 4). These results provide a nonthreatening way to help faculty members evaluate how they are spending their time. We discovered that faculty members often did not have a good sense of how much time they spent on different activities during class, and found COPUS data helpful.
In addition, faculty members can use COPUS data in their tenure and promotion documents to supplement their normal documentation, which typically includes student evaluation information and a written description of classroom practices. Having observation data gives faculty members substantially more information to report about their use of active-learning strategies than is usually the case.
COPUS data can also be used to develop targeted professional development. For example, anonymized, aggregate COPUS data across all departments have been shared with the UMaine Center for Excellence in Teaching and Assessment, so workshops and extended mentoring opportunities can better target the needs of the faculty. One area in particular that will be addressed in an upcoming professional development workshop is using clickers in a way that promotes peer discussion. The idea for this workshop came about as a result of the COPUS evidence showing the prevalence of UMaine STEM classes that were using clickers but allowing no or minimal time for recommended student peer discussions (Figure 6).
Other planned uses for COPUS include carrying out systematic observations of all instructors in a department at UBC in order to characterize teaching practices. The information will be used with other measures to characterize current usage of research-based instructional practices across the department's courses and curriculum.
In the end, the choice of observation protocol and strategy will depend on the needs of each unique situation. COPUS is easy to learn, characterizes nonjudgmentally what instructors and students are doing during a class, and provides data that can be useful for a wide range of applications, from improving an individual's teaching or a course to comparing practices longitudinally or across courses, departments, and institutions.
Previous Section
Next Section
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS