Study #5: Measuring Student Outcomes
This work won the IJAD 2021 Article of the Year award, and the commendation sums up its contribution to the literature nicely: "The paper has a great deal to offer academic development practice and offers a way forward for practitioners to develop rigorous evaluations of the initiatives we champion, which can be used to justify those initiatives and garner institutional support—especially important given the performance regimes that are increasingly becoming prevalent across the world. Using a range of statistical measures, the authors provide insights that will prove helpful to the academic development community, both in terms of findings and methods, and present a robust, comprehensive, and convincing study of the effects of academic development interventions on instructor practices and student learning."
Educational developers are increasingly asked to demonstrate the efficacy of their work and to provide evidence that the investment in educational development (ED) is worthwhile. This study contributes to research focused on establishing the link between participation in ED programs, changes in teaching practices, and improved student learning. Specifically, drawing on research on intensive course design workshops and faculty learning communities, it examines the impact of different ED intervention types and durations. Unique in its design, this study uses a multi‐indicator strategy and direct measures such as syllabi and classroom observations to assess changes in teaching as well as institutional grade data to approximate student success.