Look Who's Talking: Teaching and Discourse Practices across Discipline, Position, Experience, and Class Size in STEM College Classrooms

Abstract

Students are more likely to learn in college science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) classrooms when instructors use teacher discourse moves (TDMs) that encourage student engagement and learning. However, although teaching practices are well studied, TDMs are not well understood in college STEM classrooms. In STEM courses at a minority-serving institution (MSI; n = 74), we used two classroom observation protocols to investigate teaching practices and TDMs across disciplines, instructor types, years of teaching experience, and class size. We found that instructors guide students in active learning activities, but they use authoritative discourse approaches. In addition, chemistry instructors presented more than biology instructors. Also, teaching faculty had relatively high dialogic, interactive discourse, and neither years of faculty teaching experience nor class size had an impact on teaching practices or TDMs. Our results have implications for targeted teaching professional development efforts across instructor and course characteristics to improve STEM education at MSIs.

Keywords: CDOP; COPUS; graduate; teacher discourse moves; undergraduate.

Figure 1.

Three discourse approaches (i.e., authoritative, noninteractive; authoritative, interactive; and dialogic, interactive) percentage of codes on the y-axis, in response to teaching practices (i.e., presenting and guiding) percentage of codes on the x-axis. Scatter plots and best-fit lines are shown with Spearman's correlation coefficient (ρ) and p-value for (a) presenting as a function of authoritative, noninteractive; (b) presenting as a function of authoritative, interactive; (c) presenting as a function of dialogic, interactive; (d) guiding as a function of authoritative, noninteractive; (e) guiding as a function of authoritative, interactive; and (f) guiding as a function of dialogic, interactive. The shaded area shows the 95% confidence intervals for the best-fit line.

Figure 2.

Box-and-whisker plots showing the percentage of codes that instructors spent on different teaching practices (a) and discourse practices (b) across 74 STEM class sessions. The boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR) of practices for each collapsed code, whiskers represent the largest and smallest values within 1.5 times the IQR, lines within each box represent the median, the blue diamond represents the mean, and the black dot represents the outliers.

Figure 3.

Violin and box-and-whiskers plots show the percentage of codes that instructors spent on different teaching practices (a) and discourse practices (b) across STEM disciplines, including biology, chemistry, mathematics, and other STEM. The violin represents the density of the code frequency. The boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR) of practices for each collapsed code, whiskers represent the largest and smallest values within 1.5 times the IQR, lines within each box represent the median, and the black dot represents the outliers.

Figure 4.

Violin and box-and-whisker plots showing the percentage of codes used by instructor types for teaching practices (a) and discourse practices (b). The violin represents the density of the code frequency. The boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR) of practices for each collapsed code, whiskers represent the largest and smallest values within 1.5 times the IQR, lines within each box represent the median, and the black dot represents the outliers.

Figure 5.

Violin and box-and-whisker plots showing the percentage of codes by instructors’ years of teaching experience for teaching practices (a) and discourse practices (b). The violin represents the density of the code frequency. The boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR) of practices for each collapsed code, whiskers represent the largest and smallest values within 1.5 times the IQR, lines within each box represent the median, and the black dot represents the outliers.

Figure 6.

Violin and box-and-whisker plots showing the percentage of codes used by instructors with respect to teaching practices (a) and discourse practices (b) in varying class sizes. The violin represents the density of the code frequency. The boxes represent the interquartile range (IQR) of practices for each collapsed code, whiskers represent the largest and smallest values within 1.5 times the IQR, lines within each box represent the median, and the black dot represents the outliers.