How approaches to teaching are affected by discipline and teaching context

Abstract

Two related studies are reported in this article. The first aimed to analyse how academic discipline is related to university teachers’ approaches to teaching. The second explored the effects of teaching context on approaches to teaching. The participants of the first study were 204 teachers from the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration and 136 teachers from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University who returned university teaching inventories. Thus, altogether there were 340 teachers from a variety of disciplines in Finland and the UK. The second study involved only the Finnish sample. The results showed that there was systematic variation in both student‐ and teacher‐focused dimensions of approaches to teaching across disciplines and across teaching contexts. These results confirm the relational nature of teachers’ approaches to teaching and illustrate the need, in using inventories such as the Approaches to Teaching Inventory, to be explicit about the context.