Abstract
How we can improve the quality of teaching in the university degree courses? What are the professors’ practices and the beliefs about their role in the students’ learning process? A group of spokespersons of seven Italian Universities has carried out an integrate sources study to answer those questions and to define a programme of activities for developing didactic skills of the teachers. This paper aims to illustrate the design and the results of a research project which involved 4,289 university professors (59% of the target population), who were teaching courses at bachelor and master level during the academic year 2014/15. The data were directly gathered by a CAWI questionnaire which was distributed to the whole teaching staff; the survey results were linked to administrative data related to the educational offer and students’ evaluation of teaching in the same academic year. The results were summarized using some indicators, which showed the diffusion of good practices of teaching, support needs, beliefs, interest and availability of the respondents. We verified the reliability of these indicators and, by means of them, we identified sub-groups of areas of expertise and needs to involve teachers in appropriate different and integrated activities, directed to develop teachers’ professional competences.
Highlights
Improvement and innovation in teaching are constant elements in universities all over the world
This allowed to manage the invitations, organize the requests, associate to every teacher their attributes of interest, guaranteeing the anonymity of the information. These attributes concerned the appropriate didactic activity (DA) for every respondent, the degree course of the considered DA, the year the numbers of hours of the DA
Respondents were asked to complete the first part of the questionnaire for at least one of their DAs: 2,760 teachers provided answers for two DAs, while 1,529 to just one DA
Summary
Improvement and innovation in teaching are constant elements in universities all over the world. Major changes nowadays concern the use of technology, the internationalisation, the overall teaching process and system (EUA, 2015). A crucial aspect is teaching effectiveness and its impact on the quality of learning (Biggs, 2011). Teachers are called to use active learning strategies, to involve students in the classroom, to promote meaningful learning. In order to do that, competences in designing learning outcomes, choosing and implementing teaching and learning methods as well as strategies for assessment and evaluation are required. Academic institutions are responsible for promoting staff development programs to enhance teaching competences (OECD, 2012; High Level Group on the Modernisation, 2013; ENQA, 2015)
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