Measuring and Improving the Climate for Teaching: A Multi-Year Study
Abstract
All organizations have "climates" that significantly affect their employees' performance and satisfaction. The authors posit that an academic department's "climate for teaching" (CFT)--or the the extent to which excellent teaching is rewarded, supported, and expected--has a profound impact on the experience of its instructors and on the quality of education they provide. Further, they argue that CFT can be altered by deliberate interventions. To these ends, the authors developed and refined a measure of CFT using a sample of graduate student instructors at a large public university. Additionally, they tested the impact of direct interventions on CFT using a pretest/posttest quasi-experimental design with multiple control groups and showed that the treatment department had significantly higher CFT. They discuss the importance of measuring and monitoring CFT for all types of institutions, especially given the increased expectations for faculty research productivity.
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