A Situative Analysis of the Relationship between Faculty Beliefs and Teaching Practice: Implications for Instructional Improvement at the Postsecondary Level

Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that the above copyright notice appears on all copies. Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agencies, WCER, or cooperating institutions. A long-standing question in education is to what degree teachers' planning and classroom practice is influenced by their pedagogical thoughts in general and beliefs about teaching and learning in particular. Drawing on theory and method from cognitive psychology, researchers of K–12 teacher thinking have established that teaching is a complex practice that is informed by both conscious and subconscious cognitive characteristics of individual teachers and features of the immediate instructional context. Beliefs, particularly those regarding how students learn, play a unique and influential role in this process by filtering new information, framing problems, and guiding action in concert with other mental representations as well as features of the immediate task environment (Fives & Buehl, 2012; Nespor, 1987). This focus on beliefs is not limited to educational research but is a fundamental problem addressed by fields as diverse as public health (Armitage & Connor, 2000), ethical decision-making in organizations (Trevino, 1986), and religious practice (Geertz, 1973), thereby underscoring the fundamental role that beliefs are thought to play in shaping cognition and behavior. Extensive research at the postsecondary level has similarly examined how the pedagogical thoughts of faculty influence their teaching practice, using a variety of constructs with which to conceptualize faculty cognition such as approaches In general, this literature advances two propositions regarding the nature of the relationship between beliefs and practice. First, researchers have found that the pedagogical thoughts of postsecondary teachers can be characterized as existing on a continuum from student-centered to teaching-centered orientations, with attendant implications for the quality of instruction and student outcomes (Kember, 1997). Second, researchers suggest that a thematic relationship exists between such approaches, classroom practice, and student outcomes, and that efforts to improve educational outcomes should support faculty in obtaining the student-centered perspectives However, this body of literature has been critiqued for insufficient conceptualization of psychological constructs, lack of attention to the influence of organizational contexts, and the tendency of researchers to rely exclusively on self-report data without observing actual classroom practice (Kane, Sandretto, & Heath, 2002). Further inhibiting this body of work is that little is known about how faculty …