Evaluating Inclusive Teaching Strategies
Anne Metevier and Lisa Hunter
A major emphasis of ISEE’s Professional Development Program (PDP) is training early-career scientists and engineers to teach more inclusively as well as more effectively. To this end, the PDP includes workshops on diversity and equity, and PDP participants are explicitly encouraged to weave inclusive instructional strategies into the inquiry laboratory activities they design and teach. In an initial effort to gauge the effectiveness of the PDP’s diversity and equity training, we have analyzed 2008 and 2009 PDP participants’ responses to a survey knowledge question that asks them to briefly describe how they would engage a diverse undergraduate student population through their teaching and research. Each participant answered the survey question before any PDP training, as well as after a series of intensive PDP workshops. We developed a rubric to score and analyze participants’ pre- and post- workshop responses, and have found that their response scores improve significantly after PDP training. This indicates that PDP training does improve participants’ understandings about how to teach inclusively. Furthermore, survey respondents who participated in the PDP in both 2008 and 2009 showed little decrease in response scores between years, but continued increases with continued training. In this paper, we detail our rubric development, survey response scoring, analysis, and results, as well as the implications our results have had for refining our goals for PDP participants and for further improving PDP workshops.
