Abstract available through the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.

Abstract available through the Clinical Journal of Sport Medicine.

The Russian Federation's recently adopted family medicine as a specialty, but with little or no training in psychosocial and behavioral issues, unlike many training programs in other countries. The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of Russian primary care physicians regarding the practice of behavioral medicine and psychosocial methods. Semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with ten Russian family physicians. Examination of key words, phrases, and concepts used by the physicians revealed five themes that physicians related to their incorporation of psychosocial/behavioral medicine methods: (1) factors limiting the practice of behavioral medicine (inadequate training; cultural barriers); (2) demand for behavioral medicine services; (3) patient-doctor issues related to behavioral medicine (e.g., communication); (4) physician's role strain; and (5) intuition and experience. These findings suggest that Russia's new family physicians would benefit from residency and post-graduate curricula in behavioral sciences, tailored to their unique needs.

Faculty who teach online courses at large research institutions have unique professional development and support needs. Communities of practice may provide a solution to feelings of isolation reported by faculty who teach online courses. Through a community of practice faculty may offer support to each and share online instructional best practices. Using a developmental study, research-based practices were operationalized using the ADDIE model to form guidelines for building and maintaining a virtual community of practice for online teaching faculty. An expert review validated and led the revision process for the set of guidelines. This study describes the development of the guidelines, the expert review, and the validation of the final product. / Ph. D.

Virginia Tech's Faculty Development Institute (FDI) was developed to address issues related to the computer technology revolution; training and education of faculty; faculty professional development; and the university adjusting to change. The purpose of this study was to identify and compare the goals, expectations, and perceived outcomes that the university, FDI developers, and the initial participants had for Virginia Tech's FDI initiative as originally implemented. Both qualitative and quantitative research methods were used in this study to identify the perceived outcomes for the developers and initial participants. The fundamental concepts of motivation theory, evaluation, personal recall, and self-perception theory are used help to describe and explain the findings of the study. Interview results from the five developers and historical document analysis were used to develop surveys for the 49 initial participants and the developers in order to provide validity for the results. Interviews, historical documents and the survey results show that initial participants, developers and the university had very similar expectations for the outcomes during and/or immediately following the initial FDI workshop. There were wider differences in expectations of long-term outcomes as a result of the FDI initiative. The results also differ in terms of the extent to which participants and developers believed that their expectations were met short and long term. / Ph. D.

This thesis provides an ethnographic account of the lived experiences of faculty development practitioners in Japan. Through participatory observation and ethnographic interviews, it seeks to understand the following research question: 'How do faculty development practitioners make sense of the concept of faculty development as a professional identity and a lived experience in Japan?' The Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, MEXT, introduced and recommended institutional ‘fakaruthī diberoppumento (faculty development)’ or ‘FD’ in 1999 and later mandated it in 2008. As a result, universities created the role and position of FD practitioner. Those FD practitioners have been involved in crafting a genre of faculty development that reconcile policy requirements, university’s requirements, and their personal understanding. This leads to a daily struggle between acting as FD practitioner according to external requirements and sustaining or constructing one’s own professional identity and values especially as an academic. By incorporating notions of ‘identity’ and ‘community’, I describe practitioners’ constant negotiation of their position between an academic and a FD practitioner. I have three arguments. First, the title of ‘FD tantōsha’ that is most commonly used in Japan creates a semantic space for negotiations to take place between different types of identities, both practiced and/or idealized. ‘Tantōsha’ literally means the person in charge and it is relatively 7 neutral label to describe the position. Second, alphabetically written ‘FD’ prevents the evolution of the concept. The term ‘FD’ is just a symbolic noun therefore it allows various interpretations but it does not allow evolution of the concept like in the USA and the UK. As an English term, ‘faculty development’ means ‘to develop’ ‘faculty’. As the focus of faculty development shifted, the term also changed, leading to terms such as ‘educational development’. Third, the temporariness of the position prevents practitioners to engage with the community for faculty development practitioners in Japan and in other countries. Therefore interpretation of the concept of faculty development, creation of the common language and knowledge base as a field, and construction of professional identity have yet to be observed.

The purpose of this qualitative study was to explore the range of consequences of a professional development workshop for two- and four-year college astronomy faculty. Its focus was how faculty participants chose to incorporate ideas and teaching strategies from the workshop with their own teaching ideas and practices. Data included pre- and post-workshop open-ended survey responses on teaching strategies from 126 faculty, follow-up online survey responses on reported teaching practices from forty-one faculty, semi-structured interviews and classroom observations with five faculty "heavy adopters" of the workshop teaching techniques, and surveys from their students. Analytical techniques used were both traditional, such as clustering, counting, and iterative descriptive coding (Miles and Huberman, 1994); as well as non-traditional, such as circle graphs (Aumann et al., 1999), and analysis of linguistic metaphors (Martin and Lueckenhausen, 2005). The main consequence of this study is that faculty development workshops can help support faculty as they create their own teaching path, and support their students in doing the same. Faculty participants reported incorporating workshop teaching strategies to their teaching practice following their participation. Interviews with and classroom observations with the five "heavy adopters" characterized how each individual retrofitted the techniques to suit his or her own teaching approaches, as revealed by their dominant teaching metaphor, as well as the metaphors used by their students to describe their classes.

<p>To address the U.S. labor shortage in the fields of agriculture and STEM, higher education needs to recruit, retain, and prepare more underrepresented minority students into agricultural and STEM disciplines. Teachers play important roles in student learning, which can lead to student academic and professional success. With university classrooms becoming more diverse, faculty need to adopt inclusive teaching methods in order to accommodate the needs and expectations of diverse students. Culturally responsive teaching embraces and integrates students’ culture into the teaching and learning process. As a result, culturally responsive teaching can offer a more engaging learning experience for all students; however, in the context of higher education, there is a lack of understanding and application of culturally responsive teaching by faculty. This study examined students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching practices in their first college mathematics course through a developed and modified instrument for higher education. Further, this study used a structural equation model to predict the relationships among students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching, sense of belonging and academic self-efficacy. Data were collected through the anonymous questionnaire administrated through Qualtrics. Participants of this study were undergraduate students enrolled in the college of agriculture, college of science and college of liberal arts at a predominately white institution (PWI) and an Historically Black College and University (HBCU). Five conclusions were generated from the study. First, the scale developed to measure students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching in higher education was a valid instrument. Second, college students observed and sensed different types of culturally responsive teaching differently. Third, students’ perceptions of culturally responsive teaching predicted students’ academic self-efficacy and sense of belonging. Fourth, students who had a higher sense of belonging were more confident as college students. Finally, African American students at an HBCU had higher perceptions of culturally responsive teaching. Implications for practice were provided to help promote the application of culturally responsive teaching in higher education. Recommendations for future research were also discussed to inform future studies regarding culturally responsive teaching in university settings.</p>

<div> <div> <div> <p>In the last two decades, higher education researchers have reported numerous benefits of integrating technology tools in course instruction and their subsequent impact on the students’ learning process. In spite of the accumulation of the large amount of evidence and multiple calls to adopt technology tools in instruction, traditional lecturing is observed to dominate and continue being the preferred mode of instruction in STEM courses. One of the major reasons for the shortage of large-scale adoption of technology-based instruction is attributed to the lack of knowledge and skills of STEM instructors on how to effectively integrate technology tools into their courses. Most faculty development programs that are organized to help instructors build the necessary knowledge and skills end up introducing different technology tools to the instructors without truly helping them understand how to contextualize the tools based on the course requirements and learning needs of the study. This study aimed to understand the experiences of how engineering faculty in India learn to integrate technology tools as part of a 6-week faculty development program. </p> <p>Seven engineering faculty from a single institution attended the 6-week program to redesign a course of their choice by integrating educational technology tools. A conceptual framework called Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) was used to understand how the instructors learned to integrate technology tools into their respective courses. TPACK is a widely used framework that depicts an instructor’s knowledge of educational technology as a multifaceted construct that is combined with their knowledge of the course content and pedagogy. A qualitative case study approach was used in this study to understand how the engineering faculty developed TPACK and highlight the challenges that they encountered while integrating technology tools into their courses. Thematic analysis was employed to analyze the data that was collected through semi- structured interviews, reflection journals, and final reflections. </p> </div> </div> <div> <div> <p>11 </p> </div> </div> </div> <div> <div> <div> <p>The findings from the study indicate that the faculty developed TPACK in three stages. In the first stage, they developed basic knowledge of content, pedagogy, and technology (also called basic sub-domains of TPACK). The faculty in the next stage formed mental models to intersect and understand the interrelations between the three basic sub-domains. In the last stage, the faculty developed TPACK by building a meta-conceptual awareness of how to utilize the knowledge gained in stage two to address the limitations in their current mode of instruction and the learning needs of the students. It was observed that the faculty after developing TPACK started to emphasize on a more student-centric mode of instruction. The faculty reported to encounter challenges while constructing mental models as they were unable to critically reflect on their courses. They faced difficulty while identifying and integrating technology tools as a result of low- technology self-efficacy. Faculty reported to overcome these challenges and receive support from the other participants as a result of a community of practice that was established prior to the start of the faculty development program. The study at the end provides recommendations to faculty developers on how to design and facilitate effective workshops that are aimed to help instructors integrate technology tools. A model which was developed from the findings of the study is provided to promote large scale integration of technology-based instruction in universities. </p> </div> </div> </div>

The integration of an instructional good idea in undergraduate classes through the natural and evolutionary process of instruction renovation was the focus of this study. More specifically, the question What personal, contextual, and innovation-related forces act on the integration of active learning into the traditional signature pedagogies of university tenured faculty? was addressed in an extensive research agenda spanning seven years. In the mixed methods study central to this research portfolio, self-nominating faculty who were proponents of active learning at the University of Saskatchewan shared their stories and perceptions about integrating active learning in their undergraduate classes through written data, surveys, questionnaires, focus group meetings, and individual interviews. The study revealed that the integration of active learning, and the development of unique personal signature pedagogies, took place naturally in a benignly neutral environment, when desire met with combinations of perceived needs and timely, resonating active learning solutions. Rather than change, instructional methods were gently renovated as participants experimented with solutions to address student learning needs. Active learning was fit together with personal and professional beliefs about student capabilities and effective instruction, and college signature pedagogies.<p> Participants indicated that supportive faculty development, student enthusiasm and engagement, policy that neither encouraged nor discouraged active learning, and the benefits of active learning were driving forces. Restraining forces included unsupportive or negative students and peers, a lack of alignment between stated organizational values and enacted values regarding rewards, and time. Active learning was thought to be effective, but was also perceived to be complex, difficult to try and assess, and too dissimilar from other instructional methods to integrate easily.<p> Findings from the central study and experiences associated larger doctoral research agenda activities suggest that faculty development could be expanded to provide coaching and suggest instructional methods which are clearly linked with signature pedagogies and instructional problems, and that small manageable ways in which active learning can be easily and comfortably integrated in undergraduate classes are showcased. In addition, students could be encouraged to interact with faculty as often as possible, that student stories of engaging instructional activities be prominently profiled, and that stated organizational values be clearly aligned with enacted values and the formal reward structure.<p> Future studies might focus on the effects of planting highly-regarded teaching enthusiasts, the relationship between student and faculty enthusiasm and engagement, the effects of external rewards on the inclusion of active learning, the role of collegial support in the integration of active learning, and the process of integrating other good ideas. Research might also be conducted on removing identified barriers and increasing driving forces identified in this study. An extension and elaboration of this study might create communities of practice on campus and encourage positive conversations about teaching as well as reveal additional driving and restraining forces that act on the integration of good ideas in undergraduate classes.