Creation of an Observational Instrument to Operationalize the Transmission of Contents by University Teachers

Abstract

The quality of university teaching is a very important aspect for the educational process. This aspect makes necessary the evaluation of teaching professionals, being of special relevance the teaching behavior in the classroom. Observational methodology is the one used for evaluation, because it allows the study of usual behavior patterns and teaching strategies. We have used the instrument PROFUNDO-UNI, which is based on the "Teaching Functions Model", to analyze the behaviors of the university teachers and professors in the class. The objective of this study is the detailed analysis of one of the teaching functions described in this instrument. This function is the professor's explanation. It is a function of particular relevance in the educational setting, so it is very important to analyze it. For that, an instrument named Observational Protocol of the Explanation Function (OBEF) was created based on contributions of Educational Psychology. It allows the measurement of the resources and strategies used during the explanation. In this investigation, the psychometric goodness of fit has been tested through the analysis of reliability and homogeneity. Later, the behavior of a teacher from the University of La Laguna has been analyzed by using the instrument that was created.

Protocolo de observación de la función de explicación (PROFE): un instrumento para operacionalizar la transmisión de contenidos por parte del profesorado

“…En primer lugar, se grabaron en video ocho horas de docencia para cada profesor, escogiendo aquellas sesiones con mayor calidad de sonido e imagen. En segundo lugar, se comprobó la fiabilidad inter observadores y la homogeneidad de la última versión del instrumento, en su depuración definitiva, una vez creado el instrumento (Borges et al, 2016). Para asegurar una codificación eficiente, esto es, seleccionar tanto sesiones como tiempo dentro de la misma sin perder precisión, se realizó una prueba de optimización (Rodríguez-Dorta & Borges, 2015; 2016), mediante la Teoría de la Generalizabilidad [TG] (Cronbach, Gleser, Nanda & Rajaratnam, 1972), para la fase de desarrollo de la clase.…”

“…La mayor relevancia que ha cobrado la observación para evaluar conductas en los últimos años, se manifiesta en el desarrollo de instrumentos de observación en el aula Borges, Falcón, & Díaz, 2016;Cameron, Connor & Morrison, 2005;Díaz, Borges, Valadez & Zambrano, 2014;Good, Mulryan, & McCaslin, 2006), así como su aplicación a aspectos diversos. Tales como buenas prácticas docentes Díaz, Borges, Valadez & Zambrano, 2015a), desempeño del profesorado con alumnado de necesidades especiales (Rodríguez-Dorta & Borges, 2017), su utilidad para medir el Burnout (Díaz, Borges & Valadez, 2013), así como el estudio de determinadas problemáticas metodológicas (Rodríguez-Dorta & Rodríguez-Dorta & Borges, 2016;Rodríguez-Naveiras & Borges, 2015), demostrando la validez cruzada del instrumento observacional para medir la conducta del profesorado en sistemas educativos diferentes (Díaz, Borges, Valadez & Zambrano, 2015b).…”

Behavioral Patterns in Special Education. Good Teaching Practices

“…However, it would be extremely interesting to be able to capture how they do it, that is, the specific strategies that the teacher use to explain, guide, reinforce or evaluate. These aspects have begun to be analyzed with university teacher through the Protocol of Observation of the Function of Explanation (PROFE in Spanish) ( Borges et al, 2016b ). This protocol has been designed to operationalize how the teacher transmits knowledge, collecting all those strategies, resources or observable styles that the teacher uses during the theoretical exposition of the contents.…”

Influence of Teaching and the Teacher’s Feedback Perceived on the Didactic Performance of Peruvian Postgraduate Students Attending Virtual Classes During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Educational research has focused on studying the teaching and feedback processes seen from different standpoints, with a major emphasis on the in-person modality. Numerous methods have been described in the past to assess teaching from the students' outlook (Borges et al, 2016;Gitomer, 2018;Joyce et al, 2018;Aidoo and Shengquan, 2021), as well as to evaluate the feedback provided by teachers in terms of their own students' performance (Jellicoe and Forsythe, 2019;Krijgsman et al, 2019;Winstone et al, 2019;Wisniewski et al, 2020;Krijgsman et al, 2021). The correlation between the teacher's and the students' performances during didactic interactions has also been an object of study (Peralta and Roselli, 2015;Velarde and Bazán, 2019;Kozuh and Maksimovic, 2020).…”