The POD Network invites educational developers and scholars to submit reflective responses to the Randall Bass essay “What’s the Problem Now? for a special issue of the To Improve the Academy journal to be published in in fall/winter 2021.
This research explores how faculty members’ conceptions of assessment and confidence in assessment change as a result of an instructor training course.
In an effort to increase visibility of and access to the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) work on one campus, a collaboration formed between a faculty developer, a librarian, and a media specialist within a center for teaching and learning (CTL).
This critical retrospective review describes the ideation, creation, and implementation of a faculty development fellows program at a regional comprehensive university.
Significant progress has been made in understanding science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education and ways it can be improved, but propagation of change remains a challenge. This study presents an analysis of STEM faculty responses to open-text survey questions that asked them to identify motivations and obstacles to making changes in their teaching.
Gary A. Smith
Many faculty members demonstrate unwavering resistance to adopting research-based instructional strategies. This phenomenon commonly fits with motivated reasoning, whereby a person feels threatened by persuasion to change, leading to overtly defensive and sometimes disruptive behaviors and refusal.
Marsha Lovett and Chad Hershock
A prominent goal of colleges and universities today is to enact data-driven teaching and learning. Faculty clearly play a key role, and yet they tend to have limited time, a lack of training in assessment or education research, and few incentives for engaging in this work.
Richard J. Reddick, Beth E. Bukoski, and Stella L. Smith
With an understanding that equity-minded faculty development is an essential space in which to respond to cultural taxation (CT), our study employed a phenomenological focus group design to investigate how Black faculty at a research-intensive PWI located in a creative class city buffeted by racial tensions navigated their service and community experiences.
Randall Bass
Revisiting an essay from 1999, this article explores the current conditions in higher education, and society more broadly, that help shape the roles for the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) and educational development.
Lindsay Bernhagen, PhD
Hello readers, and welcome to both a new year and a new phase for To Improve the Academy. As your editor, I am thrilled to announce that this is our first open access issue brought to you by our new publisher, Michigan Publishing Services.
To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development is an electronic journal that seeks to advance excellence in research and practice in educational development.
To Improve the Academy is published by Michigan Publishing Services (MPS), an open-access division of the University of Michigan.
We are in the process of moving our entire backfile to the new platform. The entire history of TIA will be available online and for free, in one spot. The PDFs of each article will be entirely searchable and screen-reader accessible.
Lindsay Bernhagen, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin Stevens Point, Editor
Michael S. Palmer, Ph.D., University of Virginia, Associate Co-Editor
Lindsay Wheeler, Ph.D., University of Virginia, Associate Co-Editor
Strategic Goals
To Improve the Academy endeavors
Submission Guidelines are available here.
Publication History & Citation Note: To Improve the Academy was published as a printed, edited book with the title, To Improve the Academy: Resources for Faculty, Instructional, and Organizational Development (Jossey-Bass) until 2013, when it moved to an electronic journal with a revised title, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development (Wiley). Articles published when it was a print publication (i.e. 2013/Volume 32 and earlier) are cited as book chapters, and those published after 2013/Volume 33 are cited as journal articles.