UC San Diego

Research institutions employ instructors with various faculty titles to teach undergraduate students, but it is unclear whether Tenure-track Teaching Faculty (TF) are implementing more effective learning pedagogies than their Non-Tenure track Lecturer and Tenure-track Research Faculty (RF) counterparts. To determine what types of learning pedagogies were being implemented in undergraduate biology classrooms from University of California, San Diego, we quantified their classroom learning activities with the Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS) and coded the cognitive skills needed for the corresponding exam questions with Bloom’s Taxonomy. We observed that Teaching faculty engaged in significantly more Interactive activities and fewer Passive activities than Lecturers and Research Faculty. Subsequent analyses on the cognitive skills needed for exam questions revealed Teaching faculty incorporate fewer Recall questions than Research Faculty. Therefore, with significant differences in both between Research Faculty and Teaching faculty, an instructor’s teaching practices may correlate with their assessment practices. Research faculty spend more time on Passive activities in the classroom, which predicts higher proportions of rote memorization questions on exams. Future work to incorporate student feedback surveys and course grades might paint a more holistic picture about the effectiveness of different teaching and assessment practices.