7: Promoting Dialogue and Action on Meta-Professional Skills, Roles, and Responsibilities

Abstract

Collecting and using information about faculty skills can serve as an organizational development activity to guide faculty evaluation and professional development policy and practice with the goal of leading to improved teaching and learning. This chapter presents findings from a study with international, local, quantitative, and qualitative components. Readers are encouraged to explore data patterns and consider courses of action that these imply, and to reflect on the potential usefulness of the Meta-Profession model for furthering reflection, dialogue, and action on development and evaluation processes on their own campus.

The Effects of Doctoral Teaching Development on Early-Career STEM Scholars’ College Teaching Self-efficacy

“…Because self-efficacy beliefs are specific to a particular performance domain, measuring self-efficacy requires breaking a performance domain into meaningful and ostensibly independent dimensions ( Bandura, 2006 ; Betz and Hackett, 2006 ; Lent and Brown, 2006 ). Drawing on work that attempts to identify the various components of college teaching (e.g., Lowman, 1995 ; Hativa, 2000 ; Chism, 2007 ; Theall et al , 2009 ) and a synthesis of research on college teaching in science and math ( NRC, 2003 ), we subdivided the general domain of postsecondary teaching into six dimensions: 1) course planning, 2) teaching methods, 3) creating learning environments, 4) assessing student learning, 5) interacting with students, and 6) mastering subject knowledge. Each dimension was initially measured by five items using five-point Likert-type scales ranging from 1 (not at all confident) to 5 (extremely confident).…”