Are Instructors Aware of Their Teaching Practices?
We also examined the extent to which observed faculty members
are aware of their own teaching practices by asking faculty
members to fill out the TPI (Wieman and Gilbert, 2014).
To determine whether there are differences between the faculty
members who completed the survey (n = 33) and those
who did not (n = 10), we compared the collapsed presenting
code percentages between the two groups and did not find a
significant difference (one-tailed Wilcoxon two-sample test,
p = 0.141).
The TPI measures the extent of research-based teaching
practices in STEM courses via a detailed scoring system—
the more teaching practices an instructor uses, the higher
the score. Therefore, we started by comparing the scores
on the TPI with the percentage of presenting. We found a
significant negative correlation between the two variables
(Pearson’s r = −0.467, p < 0.05), meaning that the more an
instructor presents, the fewer research-based teaching practices
he or she claims to employ.
Because the TPI measures a variety of teaching practices
that occur outside the classroom (e.g., assigning graded
homework and the frequency of exams), we also examined
the scores on the In-class Features and Activities section of
the survey, which specifically asks questions that relate most
directly to the COPUS observation data. We again found a
significant negative correlation between the two variables
(Pearson’s r = −0.509, p < 0.05; Figure 6).
Examples of the variation in instructor response to two of
the questions in the In-class Features and Activities section
are also shown (Figure 7). In particular, the TPI asks instructors
to answer a multiple-choice question about how often
they lecture, and we found a general trend that faculty members
in quadrant IV report lecturing more often than those
in quadrant I. Conversly, we found the opposite trend when
faculty members responded to multiple-choice questions
about the average number of times students have smallgroup
discussions in class. Faculty members in quadrant I
report engaging in this practice more often. Taken together,
these results suggest that many faculty members are aware
of how often they are using a subset of practices recorded in
the COPUS observations.
Finally, three questions on the TPI focus on how often
faculty members share and learn about teaching practices.
It is important to note that the responses to questions