Background: Preparing healthcare professionals for teaching is regarded as essential to enhancing teaching effectiveness. Although many reports describe various faculty development interventions, there is a paucity of research demonstrating their effectiveness.Objective: To synthesize the existing evidence that addresses the question: “What are the effects of faculty development interventions on the knowledge, attitudes and skills of teachers in medical education, and on the institutions in which they work?”Methods: The search, covering the period 1980–2002, included three databases (Medline, ERIC and EMBASE) and used the keywords: staff development; in-service training; medical faculty; faculty training/development; continuing medical education. Manual searches were also conducted.Articles with a focus on faculty development to improve teaching effectiveness, targeting basic and clinical scientists, were reviewed. All study designs that included outcome data beyond participant satisfaction were accepted....

/pdf/a-systematic-review-of-faculty-development-initiatives-3otzax43oj.pdf

A systematic review of faculty development initiatives designed to improve teaching effectiveness in medical education: BEME Guide No. 8.

A systematic review of faculty development initiatives designed to improve teaching effectiveness in medical education: BEME Guide No. 8

This article reports a study on the effectiveness of university teachers’ training involving 22 universities in 8 countries. A training group of teachers and their students were studied at the start of their training and one year later. A control group of new teachers received no training and both they and their students were studied in the same way. Evidence is reported of changes over time relating to three measures: (i) student ratings of their teachers using six scales from the Student Evaluation of Educational Quality questionnaire (SEEQ) and the ‘Good Teaching’ scale of the Module Experience Questionnaire (MEQ); (ii) the extent to which teachers described themselves as teacher-focused and student-focused in their approach to teaching, using two scales from the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI); and (iii) the extent to which these teachers’ students take a surface approach and a deep approach to learning, using two scales from the MEQ. The article reports evidence of a range of positive changes ...

The Impact Of Training Of University Teachers on their Teaching Skills, their Approach to Teaching and the Approach to Learning of their Students

Feedback is central to the development of effective learning, yet is comparatively underresearched. This article seeks to examine the notion of written feedback on assignments and argue that this feedback process is more complex than is sometimes acknowledged. The author illustrates the problematic nature of assignment feedback by drawing on a large‐scale questionnaire survey conducted across eight universities, and then analysing the issue in more depth though fine‐grained data collected from students in a teacher education institute. The article is framed by the concepts of discourse, power and emotion. It highlights a number of different perceptions of students and tutors towards the assessment, marking and feedback process. The author concludes by arguing that ‘assessment dialogues’ are a way forward to mitigate some of the mistrust or misconceptions that may be unwanted outcomes of the assessment process.

/pdf/differing-perceptions-in-the-feedback-process-1hvm2izrkj.pdf

Differing perceptions in the feedback process

This article reviews current scholarship about how to promote change in instructional practices used in undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. The review is based on 191 conceptual and empirical journal articles published between 1995 and 2008. Four broad categories of change strategies were developed to capture core differences within this body of literature: disseminating curriculum and pedagogy, developing reflective teachers, enacting policy, and developing shared vision. STEM education researchers largely write about change in terms of dis- seminating curriculum and pedagogy. Faculty development researchers largely write about change in terms of developing reflective teachers. Higher education researchers largely write about change in terms of enacting policy. New work often does not build on prior empirical or theoretical work. Although most articles claim success of the change strategy studied, evidence presented to support these claims is typically not strong. For example, only 21% of articles that studied implementation of a change strategy were categorized as presenting strong evidence to support claims of success or failure of the strategy. These analyses suggest that the state of change strategies and the study of change strategies are weak, and that research communities that study and enact change are largely isolated from one-another. In spite of the weak state of the literature, some conclusions related to the design of change strategies can be drawn from this review. Two commonly used change strategies are clearly not effective: developing and testing ''best practice'' curricular materials and then making these materials available to other facul- ty and ''top-down'' policy-making meant to influence instructional practices. Effective change strategies: are aligned with or seek to change the beliefs of the individuals involved; involve long-term interventions, lasting at least one semester; require understanding a college or university as a complex system and designing a strategy that is compatible with this system. ! 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 952-984, 2011

/pdf/facilitating-change-in-undergraduate-stem-instructional-2q2wqazaar.pdf

Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM instructional practices: An analytic review of the literature

Educational development has changed in many ways over the last 40 years and the International Consortium for Educational Development has highlighted the sheer variety of practices by bringing together educational developers from countries where activities differ markedly. These reflections identify the wide range of foci of attention that are visible – what it is that developers are trying to develop – and the different change mechanisms that they adopt. It also highlights changes that can be seen over time, as educational development within a university, or within a country, matures and expands. Observations are made about the value and desirability of some of these changes. It is hoped that outlining the changes in educational development helps educational developers to recognise their own activities in a different light and to prompt reflections on what else they might do and what direction they might move in.

Reflections on the changing nature of educational development

A review of literature on student assessment (Gibbs and Simpson, in press) has identified eleven conditions under which assessment supports student learning. A questionnaire has been developed to measure the extent to which assessment is experienced by students as meeting these conditions. Questionnaire items were generated, based on pilot interviews with students on a range of science courses, and on published accounts of student experience of assessment, to form a prototype Assessment Experience Questionnaire (AEQ). This prototype AEQ contains six scales, each containing six items, that address the eleven conditions: 1 Time demands and student effort 2 Assignments and learning 3 Quantity and timing of feedback 4 Quality of feedback 5 Use of feedback 6 The examination and learning This prototype has been administered to a total of 1,050 students on seven science courses at Institution A and also to 529 students on seven science courses at Institution B. The three scales concerning feedback (Scales 3, 4 and 5) have also been administered to 700 students on a wide range of other courses at Institution A. The AEQ is being used to diagnose where assessment could be modified to improve student learning. In a three year study, modifications will be made to assessment patterns on the courses being surveyed and the AEQ administered on the revised courses to monitor the impact of changes. The paper describes the theoretical and empirical basis of the prototype AEQ, describe its characteristics, and outlines plans for its further development. Contact

Measuring the response of students to assessment: the Assessment Experience Questionnaire

This article reviews the work of Ference Marton and his group of researchers at the University of Goteborg in Sweden. It describes and explains research into: what students learn; how students approach studying; the relationship between approach to study and learning outcomes; what students understand learning to consist of; and whether it is possible to manipulate students' approach to studying in order to influence the learning outcomes. This review is intended to build up an overall picture of learning as seen from a phenomenological research perspective.

A review of the research of Ference Marton and the Goteborg Group: A phenomenological research perspective on learning

A three year research study at two universities in the UK has been examining the way the design of assessment on a wide range of science courses affects the ways students go about their studying. Its starting point has been a set eleven ‘conditions under which assessment best supports learning’, based on theory and on empirical evidence from studies of strategic changes in assessment (Gibbs,1999; Gibbs, 2002; Gibbs and Simpson, in press). These conditions concern how assessment captures students time and effort and distributes it across a course, how assessment generates productive learning activity, how assessment provides sufficient prompt feedback, the quality of feedback, and how students respond to feedback and use it to inform subsequent learning. The way these characteristics of assessment systems operate in practice has been explored through interviews with students on a series of science courses at the Open University. The ‘Assessment Experience Questionnaire’ (AEQ), which measures the extent to which the 11 conditions are met on courses, will be described. The AEQ has been administered to students on 15 Physics, Chemistry, Astronomy and Bioscience courses, each with different patterns of assessment. Assessment issues have been identified concerning the volume and distribution of student effort and in the use students make of feedback. The project will go on to implement principled changes to assessment design on these courses and to study the impact of these changes on students’ responses and study patterns using the AEQ and other evaluation evidence.

Graham Gibbs

Papers

The Impact Of Training Of University Teachers on their Teaching Skills, their Approach to Teaching and the Approach to Learning of their Students

Reflections on the changing nature of educational development

Measuring the response of students to assessment: the Assessment Experience Questionnaire

A review of the research of Ference Marton and the Goteborg Group: A phenomenological research perspective on learning

Improving student learning through changing assessment - a conceptual and practical framework