Impact of a spanish Higher Education teacher development programme on approaches to teaching. Psychometric properties of the S-ATI-20 scale

The quality of teacher training at universities has been a never-ending debate among authorities and academics because of its impact on student learning. Learning to teach at the Higher Education level is not a straightforward path, and there are often few opportunities to learn how to teach at this level prior to taking on a teaching position. Universities should monitor the extent to which teachers accomplish their teaching duties and endeavour to improve their teaching skills and aptitudes, as well as their attitudes towards and commitment to students. Following the Students’ Approaches to Learning (SAL) line of research, this study addressed teacher training by analyzing the impact of a brief teaching development programme on teachers’ approaches to teaching using a Spanish 20-item questionnaire (S-ATI-20), which is an updated and validated version of the Approaches to Teaching Inventory (ATI), and qualitative data. A pre-experimental design (pretest-posttest) with no control group was used. Data from 85 teachers were collected during three consecutive academic years: 2014-2015 (n = 48), 2015-2016 (n = 22) and 2016-2017 (n = 15). Findings showed that short development programmes can have a positive effect on teaching approaches; in addition, results supported a two-factor structure of the S-ATI-20, which implies that teachers may be Conceptual Change/Student-Focused (CCSF) or Information Transmission/Teacher-Focused (ITTF) while teaching. Finally, the theoretical discussion of the impact on teaching approaches gives us ground to (re)think the relation between different ways of handling teaching duties: Are approaches really on a bipolar continuum? Shall we think of approaches in terms of a matrioshka model?