Instructors' Attitudes toward Active Learning

Abstract

Although many innovations were developed in teaching in the past twenty years, only a limited fraction of faculty tends to adopt these new methods. Changing the way teaching is viewed within the engineering departments may be the appropriate lever to bring about substantive change in the teaching practices of engineering faculty. With the aim to recognize and measure the adoption level of innovation in teaching methods, we developed a survey with 35 items in six categories. The survey measures the faculty’s beliefs regarding the following points: tutoring students during class time, the importance of students' collaborative learning, students' ability to develop and present new ideas, importance of conceptual understanding, responsibility of students for learning, and development of teaching methods. The survey was administered in three institutions, two colleges and a university. At the meeting we will present the survey and some results we collected.