An Inside View: Understanding College Teaching Quality and Academic Rigor through Classroom Observation

• In Event: Excellence in Education Research: Early-Career Scholars and Their Work

Abstract

Description of Project:
The current rhetoric about a college education from scholars, policy-makers, and the public alike is that college costs too much and lacks both rigor and relevance. While many critiques of higher education focus on a lack of learning in college (e.g. Arum & Roksa, 2011), these studies do not view higher education from the inside: by watching the educational processes unfold. By contrast with K-12 education research, which has an extensive, broad-scale, quantitative observational program of study (e.g., Hill, Charalambous, & Kraft, 2012), to date there is no broad-scale quantitative observational study of college teaching. Building off of decades of research in higher education as well as K-12 education, psychological, and sociological research on learning and educational practices, the purpose of this NAEd/Spencer postdoctoral fellowship study is to explore a new conceptualization for college educational quality and a new methodological protocol that allows for deeper insight into the educational core of college. This study uses quantitative observational and syllabus analysis data from approximately 600 courses across 9 colleges and universities to view the nuanced and contextualized teaching practices that shape rigorous college coursework.

Developing Conceptualization:
This study uses a developing definition of college educational quality that considers what is taught, how it is taught, and to whom is it taught. Using new theories that apply understanding of effective teaching practices from the learning sciences to a college context (Neumann, 2014), I study the development of subject-matter ideas, the instructor’s ability to bring forth students’ prior knowledge, and the ways in which instructors help students bridge this prior knowledge to new course ideas. I also study the cognitive complexity in the classroom (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001; Bloom, 1965) and the standards and expectations for preparation and participation in class.

Applying Rich Theories Requires Different Methodological Tools:
The current broad-scale data collection mechanisms in higher education rely on student self-report surveys and institutionally reported data. While these methods are useful for understanding graduation rates and frequencies of broad experiences in higher education (e.g. interacting with faculty), neither of these data collection methods are privy to understanding the more nuanced and contextualized educational practices in college and university coursework. Particularly given that learning takes place within specific learner, disciplinary, and course contexts, observational methods may offer a more proximal view of the college educational experience. This observational study examined 587 courses in week-long site visits to 9 colleges and universities. The colleges and universities represented in the study range from highly selective and highly ranked to non-selective and unranked, across several institutional types: research institutions, liberal arts colleges, and regional comprehensives. The poster will describe the observational process, the validation of rubrics, and inter-rater reliability.

What does An Observational View of College Classrooms Yield?:
The poster presentation will highlight early findings from the study that demonstrate how new conceptual depth and rich observational methods may offer a more proximal view of college educational quality. For example:

1. While decades of research on college teaching has investigated several forms of classroom practices, much of this research approach teaching as falling into mutually exclusive paradigms (active learning vs. lecturing; Hora & Ferare, 2014), which are easily captured by blunt methodological tools, such as student survey. By observing classrooms, we demonstrated, using Latent Class Analysis, that groups of courses enact sets of teaching practices that do not fall along binary lines. For example one group of courses may enact “active learning” but may not enact teaching practices that garner students’ prior knowledge of course ideas.

2. A second study compares the in-class teaching quality and academic rigor of courses in prestigious institutions with courses in less prestigious institutions. Results consider whether measures of quality in college that focus on resources and reputation (i.e. distal measures) may bifurcate the teaching and signaling missions of higher education.

Author

• Corbin M. Campbell, Teachers College, Columbia University