Events
DMS Statistics Seminar |
| Time: Nov 03, 2017 (11:00 AM) |
| Location: Parker Hall 246 |
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Details: Speakers:
Jordan Harshman, Assistant Professor,Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Auburn University
Marilyne Stains, Department of Chemistry, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Title: Characterizing teacher and student behaviors in over 2,000 classes: A journey into mixed-model clustering Abstract: As evidence-based instructional practices (EBIPs) have gained more and more momentum, the interest in assessing the effect of their implementation has grown. This requires a national baseline that characterizes how instructors currently teach their courses to track changes to the norms. To address this, we codified 13 student and 12 instructor behaviors in 2,028 classes taught by 545 STEM faculty from over 25 institutions. A total of seven instructional profiles, which are groups of student and instructor behaviors, were determined using mixture model clustering. Data sets this large and with this many variables are notorious for producing unstable solutions when mix-model clustering techniques are applied, but we propose a novel means of choosing an empirically superior model. The most prominent behaviors were lecturing for instructors and listening for students, resembling a traditional didactic instructional style (~55%). Another ~25% of instructors were classified into interactive lecture categories while the remaining 20% demonstrated predominately student-centered strategies. Additionally, we discovered that an instructor’s practices can vary significantly within a course, indicating that multiple observations are required to gain a complete picture of that faculty’s instruction.
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