Faculty Beliefs Interview

Introduction

College and university instructors develop beliefs and attitudes about science teaching and learning over time as a result of their own experiences as learners and as teachers, many without explicit preparation in teaching or grounding in theoretical constructs. These beliefs—about how students learn, how science should be taught, about the social and cultural context of learning—influence their curricular choices and teaching practices. One of the goals of our research is to uncover instructors' beliefs, attitudes, and underlying assumptions about teaching and learning science and to see how those beliefs change, if at all, with long-term engagement in professional development in investigation and design and inclusive teaching practices.

Collecting data about beliefs

Ideally, data about beliefs is collected from participants by a combination of methods such as surveys, reflections, and interviews. For the TIDeS project, we are collecting data from materials developers and implementers using:

  • Survey questions that probe the level of agreement with statements about teaching from the National Survey of Science and Mathematics Education (Banilower et al., 2018),
  • A qualitative, semi-structured interview protocol adapted from the Teacher Beliefs Interview (TBI) (Luft and Roehrig, 2007),
  • Reflections from materials developers during and after the implementation process.

The survey questions from the NSSME+ were incorporated verbatim into the TIDeS materials developer survey in order to allow for comparison with with the current K-12 STEM teacher workforce. Survey question responses are categorized as reform-based or traditional beliefs on the basis of the level of agreement with the statement presented.

Several of the TBI questions are geared specifically towards K-12 teachers, however, and the language is less meaningful for college-level instructors. For that reason, we modified the TBI questions while maintaining the overall structure and analysis process in order to better reach our audience. The process by which we did that and the questions in the Faculty Beliefs Interview are further described below. Interview responses are coded into the five categories described by Luft and Roehrig (2007): traditional, instructive, transitional, responsive, reform-based.

Developing and testing the Faculty Beliefs Interview

We began with the Teacher Beliefs Interview (TBI) developed by Luft and Roehrig (2007), a semi-structured interview protocol consisting of seven questions. This widely-used protocol was designed to elicit the beliefs of K–12 teachers and map those beliefs on to five categories ranging from traditional to reformed, with the ultimate goal of providing feedback to teacher preparation programs. Although some authors have used the TBI in post-secondary (college and university) contexts (e.g. Czajka and McConnell, 2019), we felt that the questions did not all solicit the types of responses we were hoping to see, particularly about instructors' perceptions of diversity, how they thought about inclusivity in their teaching, and how they structured their teaching, taking into account the college setting. However, we valued and wanted to retain the ability to map responses onto a scale.

As a result, we developed the following seven questions, based on the TBI:

  1. How do you describe your role as a teacher?
  2. Describe one of your most successful teaching experiences within this class, and why you felt it was successful.
  3. Describe one of your least successful teaching experiences and why you felt that way.
  4. How do you see your students?
  5. How do you decide how to approach a particular content area or topic in this class?
  6. How do you know when learning is occurring or has occurred?
  7. What kind of support or professional development do you feel would benefit you most as a teacher in this class?

Responses to the last question, in addition to providing insight into instructors' perceptions of their own areas of potential growth, could provide direct feedback to the project and allow us to offer professional development opportunities that met instructors' needs.

For face validity, we consulted experts who had used the TBI extensively in college settings. Their feedback on our questions guided refinement in the language of the questions. For construct validity, we piloted the interview protocol with four instructors in the spring of 2020 and coded their responses. Analysis of this data allowed us to review whether the questions were eliciting instructors' insights about our constructs- : instructors' philosophy about teaching science and their notion and approaches of successful science teaching and learning. We found that the order of the questions was critical. Eliciting the responses about most and least successful experiences in teaching often motivated them to discuss their approach in teaching science. Similarly, when instructors were asked to describe their role as a teacher, they were reflective and insightful towards describing the role of their students in their classrooms.

Initial implementation and coding of the Faculty Beliefs Interview

Instructors were interviewed at the beginning of their participation in the TIDeS program, prior to their engagement in any professional development. Initial interviews were conducted over Zoom, recorded, and transcribed. We used a Responsive Interviewing Style (Rubin & Rubin, 2012) which encouraged participants to confidently share their own ideas, express disagreements, and construct their own narratives. Transcribed interviews were analyzed in two ways. First, responses to the first six questions from all instructors were coded according to the five categories of teacher beliefs as identified in Luft and Roehrig (2007):

  • Traditional: the focus is on information, transmission, structure, or sources
  • Instructive: the focus is on providing experiences, teaching is instructor-centered
  • Transitional: the focus is on instructor-student relationships and/or an affective response
  • Responsive: the focus is on collaboration, feedback, or knowledge and skills development
  • Reform-based: the focus is on mediating student knowledge

We did not code responses to question 7 as the purpose of this question was to inform the project leaders about perceived needs for professional development. In addition, we separated the coding for question 3 (the least successful teaching experience) to indicate that respondents likely perceive it as an area of growth.

Second, we coded responses for the TIDeS guiding principles. Although we did not ask instructors explicitly about the guiding principles, we were seeking to assess the extent to which our project guiding principles were already a part of their teaching beliefs. 

Revisions to the Faculty Beliefs Interview

In years two and three of the project, we modified the questions in the FBI to accommodate the stage of the project and what we learned from the earlier interviews. The questions we asked were:

  1. How do you describe your role as a teacher?
  2. How do you see your students?
  3. What challenges do you face in achieving your vision of yourself as an instructor? Further probe: What has been most challenging to you in implementing new materials in your teaching?
  4. Describe one of your most successful teaching experiences within this class, and why you felt it was successful.
  5. When you started working on your unit/module, how did you make decisions on what to include and not to include in the module?
  6. How do you know when learning is occurring or has occurred?
  7. How do you support that learning for ALL students? 

In years two and three, we again coded the responses to the five categories of teacher beliefs. In each response, we coded phrases with the five categories; we then looked at the response holistically and assigned a category to the entire response. We collected responses to question 3 separately, again recognizing that this is an area for growth. We also continued to code responses for the project guiding principles.

References 

Banilower, E. R., Smith, P. S., Malzahn, K. A., Plumley, C. L., Gordon, E. M., & Hayes, M. L. (2018). Report of the 2018 NSSME+

Czajka, C. D. & McConnell, D. A. (2019). The adoption of student-centered teaching materials as a professional development experience for college faculty, International Journal of Science Education, 41(5), 693-711, DOI: 10.1080/09500693.2019.1578908

Luft, J. & Roehrig, G.H. (2007). Capturing Science Teachers' Epistemological Beliefs: The Development of the Teacher Beliefs Interview. Electronic Journal of Science Education,11(2), 38-63.

Rubin, H. J. & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Data analysis in the responsive interviewing model. In H.J. Rubin & I. J. Rubin, Qualitative interviewing, the art of hearing data (pp 189-211). Sage Publishers, CA.