Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2018
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.17-12-0260
Abstract
Helping faculty develop high-quality instruction that positively affects student learning can be complicated by time limitations, a lack of resources, and inexperience using student data to make iterative improvements. We describe a community of 16 faculty from five institutions who overcame these challenges and collaboratively designed, taught, iteratively revised, and published an instructional unit about the potential effect of mutations on DNA replication, transcription, and translation. The unit was taught to more than 2000 students in 18 courses, and student performance improved from preassessment to postassessment in every classroom. This increase occurred even though faculty varied in their instructional practices when they were teaching identical materials. We present information on how this faculty group was organized and facilitated, how members used student data to positively affect learning, and how they increased their use of active-learning instructional practices in the classroom as a result of participation. We also interviewed faculty to learn more about the most useful components of the process. We suggest that this professional development model can be used for geographically separated faculty who are interested in working together on a known conceptual difficulty to improve student learning and explore active-learning instructional practices.
Rights Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Was this content written or created while at USF?
Yes
Citation / Publisher Attribution
CBE—Life Sciences Education, v. 17, issue 2
Scholar Commons Citation
Pelletrau, Karen N.; Knight, Jennifer K.; Lemons, Paula P.; McCourt, Jill S.; Merrill, John E,; Nehm, Ross H.; Prevost, Luanna B; Urban-Lurain, Mark; and Smith, Michelle K., "A Faculty Professional Development Model That Improves Student Learning, Encourages Active-Learning Instructional Practices, and Works for Faculty at Multiple Institutions" (2018). Integrative Biology Faculty and Staff Publications. 461.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/bin_facpub/461
