How Important Is Effective Teaching To Engineering Faculty And Administrators?

The Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education (SUCCEED) has among its goals persuading and preparing engineering faculty to adopt effective teaching practices and improving the campus climate for undergraduate engineering education. To these ends it has designed and implemented a faculty development program that includes teaching effectiveness workshops, workshops for administrators on mentoring and supporting new faculty, and measures to create and sustain engineering faculty development programs on each member campus. To assess the impact of these efforts, the SUCCEED faculty development team designed and administered a survey of faculty teaching practices and attitudes toward teaching in 1997 1 and administered it again in 1999 2 . This paper summarizes the responses to survey items in which faculty rated the importance of effective teaching to themselves, to faculty colleagues, and to campus administrators, and the importance of effective and innovative teaching in their institution’s faculty reward system. In 1999, the survey respondents rated the importance of effective teaching to themselves very high, averaging 6.5 on a 7.0 scale. They rated its importance to their colleagues, department heads, deans, and top institutional administrators significantly lower, with the averages ranging from 5.1 to 5.6. Their ratings of the importance of effective and innovative teaching in the reward system were still lower—3.7 and 3.5, respectively. Significant differences in ratings were found by gender, primary academic function (teaching, teaching/research, and administration), involvement in SUCCEED, rank, and Carnegie Foundation classification of the institutions. All significant changes from 1997 to 1999 were in the negative direction. Our conclusion is that while SUCCEED’s faculty development efforts have had noteworthy positive effects in changing faculty instructional practices 2 , much work still remains to be done to create a sense among the faculty that efforts to improve teaching will be appreciated or rewarded.