Developing Tools to Measure Teaching Practices in Online STEM Courses
Abstract: To scale effective science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) instruction across all classroom settings, researchers and stakeholders need systematic, valid, and reliable methods to measure STEM instruction in online courses. The purpose of this project is to develop and validate measurement tools – an observational protocol and a self-report survey – to reliably collect comparable, non-evaluative data for the study of online, undergraduate STEM instruction. This work is based on similar efforts to develop measurement tools for traditional classroom based instructional practices. The theoretical framework chosen to ground this work is the Community of Inquiry which has been used widely by educational researchers and practitioners. Full implementation of the self-report tool indicates survey items form a reliable scale.