Evidence for conceptual change in approaches to teaching

ABSTRACT

The present study takes a novel quantitative approach to examine whether the change mechanisms hypothesized by conceptual change theories are involved in reconceptualizing teaching from a teacher-centred to a student-centred approach. We assessed changes in approaches to teaching, measured with the Approaches to Teaching Inventory-Revised (ATI-R), in emerging higher education faculty (N = 99) after a professional learning seminar. Latent variable analyses revealed coherent and interpretable changes in the underlying factor structure of the ATI-R, with students demonstrating more differentiated teacher-centred and student-centred concepts after the intervention. These changes are interpreted as a structural revision of approaches to teaching, consistent with conceptual change theories. Our observations not only support the importance of conceptual change in approaches to teaching but point to change mechanisms so that professional learning programmes may explicitly target them mechanisms to effect these desired changes.

KEYWORDS:

• Conceptual change
• information transfer
• student-centred
• teacher-centred
• latent variable analysis

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Janette Barrington for helpful feedback on the manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [grant number IDG 492866].