Professors' Competences Through the Perspective of STEM Students Sofia Antera Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden Board of European Students of Technology (BEST)
Dragana Manasova University Ss. Cyril and Methodius, Skopje, Macedonia Board of European Students of Technology (BEST) dragana.manasova@BEST.eu.org
Sonja Mihajlov University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia Board of European Students of Technology (BEST)
Abstract— Tertiary education institutions educate a great number of individuals of all ages every year with the aim to assist them in developing a set of skills, knowledge, competences and attitudes. The overall aim of the education process is dual: employment and contribution to society. Actors with a direct impact in this process are the professors, teachers with various roles, lecturers or heads of laboratories, supervisors or examiners While teachers in all levels of formal education are trained in specialised institutions and acquire formal teaching qualification, higher education professors lack such education in most cases. Consequently, the question raised is what competences a university professor should have in order to reach a quality teaching practice. In modern times, these competences are not limited to teaching, since professors perform multiple roles. Interpersonal competences, designing and implementing the learning process as well as innovation are also in demand. This study will reflect how students in European STEM education perceive professors’ competences within the given framework, based on their university, field of study and degree. The conclusion is reached on which competences are of more importance and which should be reinforced in order to improve the quality of transmitting the knowledge in higher educational institutions. Keywords—STEM, professor competences, student perception
1
Introduction
Tertiary education institutions educate a great number of individuals of all ages every year with the aim to assist them in developing a set of skills, knowledge, competences and attitudes. The overall aim of the education process is dual: employment and contribution to society. Actors with a direct impact in this process are adfa, p. 1, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011
professors, teachers with various roles, lecturers or heads of laboratories, supervisors or examiners. While teachers in all levels of formal education are trained in specialised institutions and acquire formal teaching qualification, higher education professors lack such education in most cases [1][2][3]. Consequently, the question raised is what competences a university professor should have in order to reach a quality teaching practice. Therefore, the present study constitutes an attempt to determine which competences are considered most important by students, for university professors to have. Special attention is given to the stakeholders most influenced by the teaching process in higher education institutions because they often detect problems that other stakeholders cannot see or choose to oversee [5]. In the European Higher Education Area (EHEA), a paradigm shift is occurring, moving from content-based to competence-based learning [6][7][8]. The introduction of “new” qualifications deriving from professional competences [9] overrides the traditional university professors’ role, which is solely based on subject matters and disciplines. On the contrary, it sets the locus on functional learning processes, that require the application of a set of knowledge, attitudes, skills, while involving the students in an active way. Aiming at developing skills for life, professors are not only expected to design and present the content of the course, but they are also responsible for providing incentives and reinforcing the critical thinking of their students [10]. Interpersonal competences, designing and implementing the learning process as well as innovation are also in demand, for professors to be able to perform this multifaceted role. Therefore, lecturer training based on competences may be the answer to the question how to achieve better results for the target group: students [4]. Educational Involvement is one of the main activities that BEST (Board of European Students of Technology) offers to STEM students all over Europe. It creates a platform to raise students’ awareness on educational matters and to provide stakeholders of the European STEM Education with the students' genuine input. Through Events on Education (EoEs) and an international survey, opinions on the desired competences of university professors were gathered, leading to the development of a more specific research. Offering a framework with competences to students, their opinion was sought through a survey on how important each one is and to what degree, with further aim to select the most vital professors’ competences according to them.
2
Competences
In recent decades and especially in Europe, a growing attention on competences is detected. Introduced to mainly describe what earlier was mentioned as qualifications, competences have gradually acquired a major role in defining many professions, including university professors. Introduced in the scientific discourse by White [14], the term competence aims to describe performance motivation, while it was approached as an effective interaction between the individual and his environment. However, the vanguard of competence-
performance approach was Chomsky [15], defining linguistic competence as individual’s innate ability to acquire the native language. Therefore, he distinguishes competence from performance. Later on, management introduced action competence, which refers to “intellectual abilities, content-specific knowledge, cognitive skills, domain-specific strategies, routines and sub-routines, motivational tendencies, volitional control systems, personal value orientations, and social behaviours” (Boyatzis as cited in [12]). By including competences related to specific professions, the focus moved to conditions related to specific roles, which ensure success in specific social groups [12]. Whereas Walker (as cited in Shukla [16]) defines competence as a set of “attributes (knowledge, skills and attitudes) which enable an individual or group to perform a role or set of tasks to an appropriate level or grade of quality or achievement (i.e. an appropriate standard) and thus makes the individual or group competent in that role”, Gonzales and Wagenaar [13] describe it as “a dynamic combination of cognitive and metacognitive skills, knowledge and understanding, interpersonal, intellectual and practical skills, and ethical values” emphasizing its complicated nature and correlating it to professionalism. Kunter et al. [11] move a step forward suggesting the term professional competence while referring to higher education professors’ competences in their attempt to relate it to teaching success. While competences can be approached as “the skills, knowledge, attitudes, and motivational variables that form the basis for mastery of specific situations” [11], they are not innate but learnable. In that sense, professional competence is the implementation of the above-mentioned set of abilities into practice, especially with reference to highly complicated and demanding professions that involve multiple roles, like that of professors.
3
Methodology
Events on Education (EoEs) were created by BEST aiming to raise awareness and involve students in the process of education improvement. EoEs are bringing together students, professors and company representatives in order to discuss relevant educational topics. To obtain diverse results, more than 20 STEM students from different countries, cultural and educational backgrounds, participate in each event. Their gender, year of study, study field and origin are among the factors that are taken into account to ensure the diversity of the participants and therefore reach a broader understanding of the given topics. Surveys are often used by BEST in order to collect information from a selected group of students. The surveys address students from the universities where a Local BEST Group (LBG) is present. The findings of this study derive from a survey conducted in a few selected universities from the BEST network within a time frame of around 4 weeks (April 2017). After an application process, 11 LBGs were selected to participate in the study. The selection was made taking into consideration the variety of countries and accessibility to students. In Figure 1 the distribution of responses per country, where
the students’ attend university, is shown. Universities that took part in the survey are KU Leuven - Belgium, University of Lorraine - France, Friedrich-AlexanderUniversity Erlangen-Nuremberg - Germany, National Technical University of Athens - Greece, Politecnico di Milano - Italy, Delft University of Technology - Netherlands, Silesian University of Technology - Poland, University of Aveiro - Portugal, Politehnica University of Bucharest - Romania, University of Ljubljana - Slovenia and National Technical University of Ukraine "Kyiv Polytechnic Institute" - Ukraine, as indicated in Figure 2. A total of 323 responses were gathered, out of which 318 valid responses were taken into account for the analysis of the survey.
Fig. 1. Graph of the survey responses by country
Responses were gathered from students enrolled in Bachelor, Master and PhD programmes in the chosen Universities, whereas the majority of responses are from Bachelor students, as indicated by Figure 2.
Fig. 2. Graph of responses per cycle of degree
Considering the gender of the participants, 62,9% declared themselves as male, while 35,2% as female. 1,9% of participants preferred not to declare their gender.
For the content of the survey, the framework developed by Lopez & Perez-Poch was used [4]. The framework gives a list of 49 indicators on competences required for good teaching practice divided into six areas: interpersonal, methodological, communicative, planning and management, teamwork and innovation competences. Apart from the given indicators, one open question per area was added to gather additional input on competences that were not covered but were still considered relevant by students (e.g. “Other interpersonal competence indicators that you find important and that is not covered above:”) [17]. All areas with indicators are described in Appendix 1 and Appendix 2 [4].
4
Results
In the original study, the main focus is on the professors’ competences and their indicators which were perceived most poorly by the professors. When analysing the students’ opinions, the indicators ranked as more important should be reinforced by the professors. The indicators were rated using a Likert scale where the choices were the following: “not important” (1); “somewhat important” (2); “important” (3); or “very important” (4). Indicators ranked as “important” (3) or “very important” (4) by more than 75% of the students, are considered as being of high importance to the sample. In Figure 3, the results are obtained according to the following steps: the percentage of both “important” (3) and “very important” (4) rankings per indicator is summed. After which, the average of these sums is considered as the average of importance to which the indicators belong. According to the results, the innovation and interpersonal competences are given a high importance ranking according to more than 75% of the surveyed students. In comparison, the teamwork competences seem to have the relatively lowest importance according to students, even though this percentage is higher than 65%.
Fig. 3. Importance ranking of the professors' competences, summed percentage of “important” (3) and “very important” ranking, represented per competence
In Table 1, the indicators, according to the students’ perception of their importance, are clustered within a few ranges. As mentioned before, an indicator or a competence is considered to have a high importance when the percentage is higher than 75%. Thus, the indicators that belong to the categories 75-80%; 80-90% and 90-100% are acknowledged as such. Table 1. Importance ranking of the professors' competences - Summed importance of each indicator clustered within the range of importance
0–60% 60–70% 70–75%
75–80%
80–90%
90– 100%
IC6
MC10 MC4; MC5; MC8
IC3; IC7 IC1; IC5; IC8 IC2; IC4; IC9
CC8 CC6; CC7
PMC4; PMC5
CC5 MC1; MC2; MC3; MC6; MC7; MC9; MC11
CC1; CC4
PMC1; PMC2; PMC3
CC3; CC9
PMC6
TC2; TC7 TC1; TC5; TC6 TC3; TC4
InnC3; InnC4; InnC6 InnC5; InnC7
InnC1; InnC2
CC2
Using the same principle as for Figure 3, summed importance of each indicator was calculated and presented in Table 2. Highest importance among interpersonal competences was given to the indicator “IC9: Encourage motivation”. For methodological competences, highest importance was given to the indicator “MC1: Use methodological strategies that stimulate student participation”. Considering communication competences, planning and management competences, teamwork competences and innovation competences, highest importance was given to indicators “CC2: Explain with clarity and enthusiasm”, “PMC6: Assess implementation of the program regarding learning and acquisition of competences; detect weaknesses and introduce improvements to ensure achievement of outcomes”, “TC4: Act for the good of the team” and “InnC1: Analyze the teaching/learning context to identify areas for improvement and apply innovative strategies and/or resources, respectively”. The indicator with indicator with highest priority of all was “CC2: Explain with clarity and enthusiasm”, with 90.88% of importance. Out of all the indicators of the six different competences, only two did not receive a ranking of importance of more than 60% of the students. The two lowest ranked indicators were: “MC10: Use different formative assessment strategies” and “CC8: Use body language as appropriate”. The first aforementioned indicator has a complex wording and it is possible that students may not have understood its meaning. The
second lower ranked indicator shows that around 40% of the surveyed students do not see body language as an important criterion when evaluating a professor’s teaching practice. Table 2. Importance ranking of the professors' competences - Summed importance of each indicator
Indicator IC1 IC2 IC3 IC4 IC5 IC6 IC7 IC8 IC9 TC1 TC2 TC3 TC4 TC5 TC6 TC7
Summed importance 76.73 88.99 74.84 81.76 77.99 61.64 70.44 77.36 89.94 71.38 63.52 75.47 76.42 74.84 72.96 67.61
Indicator MC1 MC2 MC3 MC4 MC5 MC6 MC7 MC8 MC9 MC10 MC11 PMC1 PMC2 PMC3 PMC4 PMC5 PMC6
Summed importance 79.87 75.47 75.47 68.55 66.98 79.87 79.56 68.24 76.10 53.46 77.99 79.87 75.79 76.73 64.47 66.04 82.08
Indicator CC1 CC2 CC3 CC4 CC5 CC6 CC7 CC8 CC9 InnC1 InnC2 InnC3 InnC4 InnC5 InnC6 InnC7
Summed importance 79.87 90.88 88.68 78.62 70.75 67.30 66.67 57.55 84.91 86.48 83.65 73.90 74.84 77.67 71.38 78.62
In comparison with summed importance of each indicator, only two indicators were marked as “very important” for more than 60% of applicants and these are “IC9: Encourage motivation” with 62.58% and “CC2: Explain with clarity and enthusiasm” with 61.32%. Indicators that were marked as “very important” for more than 50% of applicants are “IC2: Develop reflexive and critical thinking” with 54.40% and “CC3: Use definitions, examples and alternative explanations to facilitate understanding of the topic” with 53.14%. Surprisingly, indicator “CC8: Use body language as appropriate” has the highest percentage of being “not important”, even 10.69%. From Table 3, differences in the importance between students and professors can be clearly observed. The most notable difference is in terms of the innovation competences of professors, ranked 1st by the students and 5th by professors. This competence focuses on a professor's constant improvement of the teaching-learning processes. This also implies that professors should be proactive when it comes to education innovations.
According to the results, both students and professors perceive teamwork competences of professors as the least important. This competence refers to the lecturer not as a leader of the group but rather as a team member and equal to the students. One conclusion which can be drawn is that students still wish to see their professors as leaders who will guide them through the learning process. Table 3. Comparison of the importance of the professors’ competences according to students’ and professors’ perceptions (the data on the professors is taken from reference [4])
Ranking of importance 1 2 3 4 5 6 Sample size (n)
Students InnC (78.08) IC (77.74) CC (76.14) PMC (74.16) MC (72.87) TC (66.55) 318
Professors (all UPC) CC (97.42) IC (96.43) MC (95.23) PMC (94.45) InnC (88.29) TC (84.92) 503
Professors (nonUPC) CC (98.26) MC (96.96) IC (96.79) PMC (95.39) InnC (89.95) TC (89.95) 1,884
Figures 4 and 5 represent the correlation between the students’ and the professors’ (from UPC and non-UPC) perception on competences respectively. The Pearson’s correlation coefficient in the first case is 0.57 and in the second 0.5
Fig. 4. Students’ and professors' (all UPC) perception of the professors' importance of each competence
Fig. 5. Students’ and professors’ (non-UPC) perception of the importance of each competences
5
Discussion
During various EoEs, the topic of the professors’ competences was often mentioned, and several competences were recurring as the most desirable ones from students’ perspective. These competences reflect teaching skills, professors’ attitude, relation and interaction with students, encouraging motivation and empathy, integration of technology in lectures, using innovative teaching methods, etc. [6][7][8]. Comparing opinions gathered through EoEs with the larger sample from the results of the survey, it is shown they are mostly compatible. Professors’ classroom behaviour and lack of lecturing skills have a major negative impact on students’ motivation [6]. Miscommunication with students and lack of empathy result in students perceiving their professors as under-skilled and less interesting, leading to a loss of motivation during their lectures and therefore for the course in general [6][7]. Analysing the importance of each indicator, developing reflexive and critical thinking (IC2) has shown to be of high importance for 54.40% of applicants, encouraging motivation (IC9) for 62.58%, creating a climate of empathy (IC5) for 43.71%, showing tolerance toward other points of view (IC4) for 40.57% and planning practical activities that encourage self-learning and the development of personal and professional skills (MC6) for 44.03%. Comparing it with the summed importance of each indicator from Table 2, importance is even higher, with 88.99%, 89.94%, 77.99%, 81.76% and 79.87% respectively. “MC1: Use methodological strategies that stimulate student participation” has a high percentage of summed importance in the responses, with a total of 79.87%. The need for professors to keep up with the latest updates in their field and being more keen to integrate technology in their lectures was raised [6][7][8]. Yet, the survey shows these indicators are not considered as important, with only 39.94% of applicants rating it as very important (MC9). However, when counting the summed importance, that number is significantly higher - 76.10%.
Taking professional critics objectively, creating the atmosphere where students can freely express their opinions on the subject, the teaching or the learning process is highly valuable in students’ eyes [7]. Providing continuous feedback to stimulate students’ learning and autonomy (MC11) is highly important for 41.19% of applicants. Creating spaces where students can freely express their opinion on the subject, the teaching or learning process, gather this information and provide a response (CC5) is not ranked very high on the importance scale, only 35.85% of applicants recognised it as very important. Using the summed importance, both percentages increase to 77.99% and 70.75% respectively. The ability to set and transmit the goals of their lectures with clarity and enthusiasm are recognised as characteristics of a good professor [7]. Results from the survey are aligned with it, “CC2: Explain with clarity and enthusiasm” has 61.32% of importance and “CC3: Use definitions, examples and alternative explanations to facilitate understanding of the topic” has 53.14%. The summed importance of CC2 is 90.88% and of CC3 is 88.68%. Indicators that are also recognised as very important, with a percentage of summed importance over 75% are “PMC6: Assess implementation of the program regarding learning and acquisition of competences; detect weaknesses and introduce improvements to ensure achievement of outcomes” with 82.08%, “TC4: Act for the good of the team” with 76.41% and “InnC1: Analyze the teaching/learning context to identify areas for improvement and apply innovative strategies and/or resources” with 86.48%.
6
Conclusion
This research has shown how professors’ competences are perceived by students in European STEM education. The results of the survey were analysed and later compared with input that was gathered through EoEs. The aim was to conclude which competences are of more importance and should therefore be reinforced in order to improve the quality of the knowledge transfer in higher education institutions. This study identified several competences and their indicators, which were acknowledged as highly important both among EoE participants and participants in the survey. Results from the survey show that students highly ranked the ability of professors to “CC2: Explain with clarity and enthusiasm”, “PMC6: Assess implementation of the program regarding learning and acquisition of competences; detect weaknesses and introduce improvements to ensure achievement of outcomes”, “TC4: Act for the good of the team” and “InnC1: Analyze the teaching/learning context to identify areas of improvement and apply innovative strategies and/or resources, respectively”. Indicators that students value the least are “MC10: Use different formative assessment strategies” and “CC8: Use body language as appropriate”.
Regarding the competences, innovation and interpersonal competences are recognised as most important. When compared with professors’ perspective, the differences in perceiving the importance between students and professors can be clearly observed. The most distinguished one refers to professors’ innovation competences, ranked 1st by the students and 5th by professors. According to the results, both students and professors perceive teamwork competences of professors as the least important. The present study reveals the preference of students towards a group of competences that the ideal professor should develop, while it also points out a group of competences not in demand. Investigating further why the competences ranked highly as important are identified this way by the students, through realising focus group discussions in future EoEs, can extend and explain the findings of this survey. The aim of such an action would be to understand how students perceive the learning process, what they expect from it and how it can be improved.
7
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