Leveraging psychosocial interventions to motivate instructor participation in teaching professional development

• Type of Material: Article
• Authors: Lisa B Limeri, University of Georgia; Miranda M Chen Musgrove, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Meredith A Henry, Emory University; Elisabeth E Schussler, The University of Tennessee, Knoxville
• Language: English
• Date: 2020-09-01
• Publisher: The American Society for Cell Biology
• Publication Version: Final Published Version
• Copyright Statement: © 2020 L. B. Limeri et al. CBE—Life Sciences Education © 2020 The American Society for Cell Biology. “ASCB®” and “The American Society for Cell Biology®” are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology.
• License: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported
• Final Published Version (URL): http://dx.doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-11-0236
• Title of Journal or Parent Work: CBE Life Sciences Education
• Volume: 19
• Issue: 3
• Start Page: 1
• End Page: 12
• Grant/Funding Information: Partial funding for open access to this research was provided by University of Tennessee’s Open Publishing Support Fund, the Georgia Athletic Association Professorship in Innovative Science Education, the University of Georgia Department of Biochemistry & Molecular Biology, and the Franklin College of Arts & Sciences.
• Keywords: Education, Professional; Attitude; Teaching; Anxiety; Academic Performance; Reinforcement, Psychology; Students; Humans; Motivation
• Research Categories: Biology, Molecular; Chemistry, Biochemistry

Abstract

To promote undergraduate education reform, teaching professional development (TPD) efforts aim to encourage instructors to adopt evidence-based practices. However, many instructors do not attend TPD. There may be many reasons for this, including low intrin-sic motivation to participate in TPD. Psychologists have dealt with motivational barriers in educational contexts using psychosocial interventions, brief activities that draw on a rich history of psychological research to subtly alter key, self-reinforcing psychological processes to yield long-term intrinsic motivation and behavioral changes. Psychosocial interventions, for example, have been used to alter students’ noncognitive attitudes and beliefs, such as attributions and mindset, which positively influence students’ motivation and academic performance. Here, we propose that insights from research on psychoso-cial interventions may be leveraged to design interventions that will increase instructors’ motivation to participate in TPD, thus enhancing existing pedagogical reform efforts. We discuss psychological principles and ‘best practices’ underlying effective psychosocial interventions that could guide the development of interventions to increase instructors’ motivation to attend TPD. We encourage new interdisciplinary research collaborations to explore the potential of these interventions, which could be a new approach to mitigating at least one barrier to undergraduate education reform.