The Western Conference on Science Education

Putting research into practice: pedagogy development workshops change the teaching philosophy of graduate students.

Teaching competence is an important skill for graduate students to acquire and is often considered a precursor to an academic career. In this study, we evaluated the effects of a multi-day science teaching workshop on graduate teaching philosophies by surveying 200 graduate students – 79 who had taken the workshops and 121 who had not. We found no difference between groups (workshop attendees versus non-attendees) in the beliefs that (a) when teaching, it is important to focus on deep learning of core-concepts and (b) "memorization" is a poor learning strategy for students to adopt. However, on average, respondents who had taken the workshop allocated more in-class time for student-to-student discussions (interactive-engagement) and placed less emphasis on lecturing. These results suggest that graduate students are generally aware of the importance of conceptual learning, but graduate teaching workshops better equip them to meet this aim. We believe that graduate student science education workshops are integral to high quality science education in research-intensive institutions and we discuss the essential components of an effective workshop model.