We convened faculty institutes in 2007 and 2008.
For example, interested faculty might use the feedback practices used by the Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRS T IV www.msu.edu/∼first4/Index.html).html
In biology, two notable examples are the National Academies Summer Institute for Undergraduate Education in Biology and the NSF-sponsored Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST) program.
While there certainly are biology faculty development programs that introduce faculty to concept inventories (e.g. Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching [FIRST] IV, 2013), few appear to rely on these tools as primary evidence of program efficacy.
We aimed to determine the extent to which postdoctoral fellows (i.e., future biology faculty) believed in and implemented evidence-based pedagogies after completion of a 2-yr professional development program, Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRS T IV.
Criteria for expertise included teaching introductory biology at the university level to Gen Ed students and participation in one of two national professional development programs: Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching or the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology at the University of Wisconsin.
Course materials analyzed in this study were voluntarily submitted by faculty who completed one of two nationally recognized professional development workshops: Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST II; 2009) and the Summer Institutes on Undergraduate Education in Biology (SI) (Pfund et al., 2009).
Insufficient training, time, and incentives are among the most commonly cited barriers for faculty change, and the focus of most of the current efforts to understand and promote faculty pedagogical change (Henderson et al., 2010, 2011; AAAS, 2011; Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching [FIRST] IV, 2012; National Academies of Science/Howard Hughes Medical Institute [NAS/HHMI], 2012).
The aim of our research was to determine the extent to which postdoctoral fellows (i.e., future biology faculty) believed in and implemented evidence-based pedagogies after completion of a 2-yr professional development program, Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching IV (FIRS T IV.
The study entailed collection and analysis of data obtained from participants in two programs with similar overarching goals related to fostering use of and knowledge about active learning pedagogies: the Faculty Institutes for Reforming Science Teaching (FIRST II) and the National Academies Summer Institute on Undergraduate Education in Biology (SI).
