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How approaches to teaching areaffected by discipline and teachingcontextSari Lindblom‐Ylänne a , Keith Trigwell b , Anne Nevgi a & Paul
Ashwin ca University of Helsinki , Finlandb University of Oxford , UKc Lancaster University , UKPublished online: 24 Jan 2007.
To cite this article: Sari Lindblom‐Ylänne , Keith Trigwell , Anne Nevgi & Paul Ashwin (2006)How approaches to teaching are affected by discipline and teaching context, Studies in HigherEducation, 31:03, 285-298, DOI: 10.1080/03075070600680539
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Studies in Higher EducationVol. 31, No. 3, June 2006, pp. 285–298
ISSN 0307-5079 (print)/ISSN 1470-174X (online)/06/030285–14© 2006 Society for Research into Higher EducationDOI: 10.1080/03075070600680539
How approaches to teaching are affected by discipline and teaching contextSari Lindblom-Ylännea*, Keith Trigwellb, Anne Nevgia and Paul AshwincaUniversity of Helsinki, Finland; bUniversity of Oxford, UK; cLancaster University, UKTaylor and Francis LtdCSHE_A_168023.sgm10.1080/03075070600680539Studies in Higher Education0307-5079 (print)/1470-174X (online)Original Article2006Society for Research into Higher Education313000000June 2006SariLindblom-Ylä[email protected]
Two related studies are reported in this article. The first aimed to analyse how academic disciplineis related to university teachers’ approaches to teaching. The second explored the effects of teachingcontext on approaches to teaching. The participants of the first study were 204 teachers fromthe University of Helsinki and the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration and136 teachers from the University of Oxford and Oxford Brookes University who returned universityteaching inventories. Thus, altogether there were 340 teachers from a variety of disciplines in Finlandand the UK. The second study involved only the Finnish sample. The results showed that there wassystematic variation in both student- and teacher-focused dimensions of approaches to teachingacross disciplines and across teaching contexts. These results confirm the relational nature of teach-ers’ approaches to teaching and illustrate the need, in using inventories such as the Approaches toTeaching Inventory, to be explicit about the context.
Introduction
A growing body of research on university teachers’ approaches to teaching showsevidence of variation in the ways teachers approach their teaching. Furthermore,there is evidence that teachers’ approaches to teaching are connected with theirconceptions of teaching. A majority of researchers distinguish between a teacher- orcontent-centred and a student-centred approach to teaching. Teachers whoseapproach to teaching in a certain context can be categorised as being teacher-centredsee teaching mainly as the transmission of knowledge. These teachers concentrate onthe content of teaching and on what they do in teaching. Thus, the emphasis is on
*Corresponding author: Centre for Research and Development of Higher Education, Faculty ofBehavioural Sciences, P.O.Box 9, 00014 University of Helsinki, Finland. Email: [email protected]
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how to organise, structure and present the course content in a way that is easier forthe students to understand. On the other hand, teachers whose approach to teachingis categorised as student-centred in a particular context see teaching as facilitatingstudent learning or students’ knowledge-construction processes or as supportingstudents’ conceptual change. These teachers focus on what students do in relation totheir efforts to activate students’ existing conceptions, and on encouraging them toconstruct their own knowledge and understandings (Samuelowicz & Bain, 1992,2001; Prosser et al., 1994; Trigwell & Prosser, 1996; Biggs, 1999; Prosser & Trigwell,1999; Vermunt & Verloop, 1999; Kember & Kwan, 2002).
Are approaches to teaching stable or dynamic in nature?
Researchers have different views of the stability of approaches to teaching. Kemberand Kwan (2002) see approaches to teaching as relatively stable. Kember (1997)further argues that enormous efforts are needed in order to change teachers’ under-lying beliefs. On the contrary, Prosser and Trigwell (Trigwell & Prosser, 1996;Prosser & Trigwell, 1999), as well as Samuelowicz and Bain (2001), emphasise thecontextual and dynamic nature of approaches to teaching. Thus the same teachermay sometimes use features typical of student-centred teaching, and sometimesfeatures typical of teacher-centred teaching, depending on the teaching context. Alimited awareness of student-centred conceptions of teaching may reduce the extentof this dynamic relationship, and in some cases effectively prevent adoption ofapproaches other than those with teacher-centred elements (Prosser & Trigwell,1999; Åkerlind, 2003). These somewhat contrasting views indicate that there is aneed for further research on the relational nature of the approaches to teaching.
Does discipline have an effect on approaches to teaching?
There is little research on the effect of discipline on approaches to teaching whenapproaches are defined as above. Lueddeke (2003) showed that teachers who teachin the ‘hard’ disciplines, such as the physical sciences, engineering and medicine,were more likely to apply a teacher-centred approach to teaching, whereas teachersfrom ‘soft’ disciplines (such as social sciences and humanities) took a more student-centred approach to teaching. Trigwell (2002), in a study of design and physicalsciences teachers’ approaches to teaching, showed that design teachers were signifi-cantly more student-centred than science teachers. However, in that study, nocontrol was imposed on the teachers’ experience of the teaching context, and it canbe considered to be no more than an indicator of the possibility of disciplinarydifference.
Even though we know little about the relations between disciplines andapproaches to teaching, there are some studies which have focused on the disciplin-ary differences in the academic culture. The epistemological beliefs and the knowl-edge structures of different disciplines have been analysed in many studies (Biglan,1973; Kolb, 1981; Becher, 1987, 1994; Neumann et al., 2002). Furthermore, there
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is research on disciplinary ways of thinking and the effect of discipline on teaching,learning and doing research (Smeby, 1996; Neumann, 2001).
Becher (1989) modified Biglan’s (1973) sixfold classification and identified fourcategories of discipline, namely ‘pure hard’ and ‘pure soft’ and ‘applied hard’ and‘applied soft’, on the basis of cultural and epistemological differences. According toNeumann et al. (2002), ‘pure hard’ knowledge can be described as cumulative innature. Teaching content is linear, straightforward and uncontentious. Instructionalmethods are mainly mass lectures and problem-based seminars. The focus of studentlearning is on fact retention and on the ability to solve logically structured problems.‘Pure soft’ knowledge, on the other hand, is holistic and qualitative in nature.Teaching methods include more face-to-face class meetings and tutorial teachingincluding discussions and debates. Creativity in thinking and fluency of expressionare emphasised in student learning. ‘Applied hard’ knowledge is linear in sequenceand based on factual understanding. These sciences are concerned with the masteryof the physical environment. Teaching methods concentrate on simulations and casestudies in relation to professional settings. As in ‘pure hard’ sciences, students areexpected to learn facts, but in ‘applied hard’ sciences there is more emphasis on prac-tical competencies and on the ability to apply theoretical ideas to professionalcontexts. Finally, in ‘applied soft’ disciplines knowledge is accumulated in a re-itera-tive process. Teaching methods are close to those of the ‘pure soft’ disciplines. Theemphasis is on personal growth and intellectual breadth.
Becher (1989) developed the concept of academic tribes on the basis of Biglan’s(1973) and Kolb’s (1981) research. According to Ylijoki (2000), the core of eachdiscipline can be conceptualised as a moral order which defines the basic beliefs,values and norms of the local culture. She also found differences in the ways of under-standing the virtues and vices of studying, and in the social identities that areconstructed in different disciplines. Ylijoki argues that improvement of the quality ofteaching can only be achieved by influencing the cultural basis of the discipline. Theproduction of knowledge, as well as means for communication, varies in differentdisciplines, and students learn tacitly the norms of their disciplinary culture (Parry,1998; Ylijoki, 2000).
Self-efficacy beliefs of university teachers
Self-efficacy beliefs can be defined as individuals’ beliefs about their performancecapabilities in a particular domain (Bandura, 1982, 1997; Pintrich & McKeachie,2000; Zimmerman, 2000). The construct of self-efficacy is not considered as a globalpersonality trait, but includes instead persons’ ‘judgements about their ability toaccomplish certain goals or tasks by their actions in a specific situation’ (Pintrich &McKeachie, 2000, p. 36). Thus, self-efficacy beliefs are relative and situational innature (Bandura, 1997; Pintrich & McKeachie, 2000).
There is plenty of research on the self-efficacy beliefs of school teachers. The workof Bandura, in particular, is exhaustively detailed and broad (e.g. 1982, 1997).Research on school teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs and the learning outcomes of their
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pupils indicates that pupils of teachers with higher self-efficacy beliefs tend to havebetter learning outcomes (Bandura, 1997). There is also evidence that pre-serviceteachers with high self-efficacy beliefs are likely to select more efficient teaching prac-tices, which lead to better learning outcomes, than teachers with low self-efficacy(Gordon & Debus, 2002).
Research on university teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs is scarce. Bailey (1999) exam-ined the effects of faculty affiliation, level of appointment, gender, qualifications andresearch productivity on staff’s self-efficacy beliefs and their motivation to teach andto do research. The results showed that the level of appointment and faculty of affil-iation were related to staff’s self-efficacy beliefs for research and to motivation to doresearch, but not to their self-efficacy beliefs for teaching, nor to their motivation toteach. Even though women teachers were found to be more motivated than menteachers to teach, no differences were found in women and men teachers’ self-efficacybeliefs for teaching. Furthermore, Bailey showed that low success in research corre-lated with higher motivation for teaching.
Postareff et al. (2004) showed an effect of pedagogical training on teachers’ self-efficacy beliefs. Teachers who had completed an extensive pedagogical trainingcourse scored the highest on the self-efficacy scale. However, teachers who hadparticipated in a short course for university teachers scored lower than teachers whodid not have any pedagogical training at all. Thus, it seems to take at least a year forthe positive effects of pedagogical training to emerge. Shorter training periods seemto make teachers more uncertain about themselves as teachers. These results implythat self-efficacy beliefs, and approaches to teaching, change slowly.
Two studies are reported here. The first aimed to analyse how discipline is relatedto university teachers’ approaches to teaching and to their self-efficacy beliefs. Thesecond explored the effects of teaching context on approaches to teaching and self-efficacy beliefs.
Method
Participants
The participants of the first study were 204 teachers from the University of Helsinki(201) and the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration (3), and136 teachers from the Universities of Oxford (72) and Oxford Brookes (64). Thus,altogether there were 340 teachers (from a variety of disciplines) in two differentnational contexts (Finland and UK). The second study involved only the Finnishsample.
While the University of Helsinki and the University of Oxford are both research-intensive universities and Oxford Brookes University is a former polytechnic, a compar-ison of the means of the variables used in the studies between the two Oxford samplesand the UK and Finnish samples showed no statistically significant differences.
The teachers covered a typical range of status and experience and represented avariety of disciplines. Of the 340 teachers, 303 reported their discipline. Of these, 76
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(25%) represented the ‘pure soft’ disciplines, such as history, arts, philosophy andtheology. Ninety-one teachers (30%) represented the ‘applied soft’ disciplines, suchas education, law and social sciences. The ‘pure hard’ disciplines, such as mathemat-ics, chemistry and physics, were represented by 39 teachers (13%). Ninety-seventeachers (32%) represented the ‘applied hard’ disciplines, such as medicine,dentistry, veterinary medicine and pharmacy.
Approximately a quarter of the returns came from teachers attending pedagogicalworkshops and seminars, where return rates were about 80%. The remainder werereturned by teachers, who were randomly selected. The return rate from this groupwas about 35%.
Materials
The inventory used in this study consists of two parts: the Approaches to TeachingInventory (ATI) (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999; Trigwell & Prosser, 2004) was devel-oped from the identification of qualitatively different conceptions of, andapproaches to, teaching. It is composed of 16 items, with eight items in theconceptual change/student-focused (CCSF) approach scale and the other eightitems in the information transmission/teacher-focused (ITTF) approach to teach-ing scale. The second, and new, part of the inventory was designed by three of theauthors of this article: Trigwell, Ashwin and Lindblom-Ylänne. The aim of thispart is to explore teachers’ motivational aspects to teaching and the regulationstrategies they use. Items from the self-regulation, external regulation and lack ofregulation subscales are derived from the work of Vermunt and colleagues,whereas items from the self-efficacy and task value subscales are derived from thework of Pintrich and colleagues—see Table 1 (Pintrich et al., 1989; Lindblom-Ylänne & Nevgi, 2003; Trigwell et al., 2004). All items in the second part aremeasured on a 5-point Likert scale, from strongly disagree to strongly agree, andfrom this part only a four-item scale measuring self-efficacy was used in the analysisfor this study.
Table 1. The self-efficacy items and origins of those items
Teaching items Learning items from Pintrich et al. (1989)
17. I am confident that my knowledge of this subject matter is not a barrier to teaching it well.
17. I am confident I can understand the most complex material presented by the instructor in this course.
19. I am confident that students will learn from me in this course.
13. I am confident I can learn the basic concepts taught in this course.
21. I am certain that I have the necessary skills to teach this course.
32. I am certain that I can master the skills being taught in this class.
30. I am confident that my knowledge of teaching is not a barrier to teaching well.
7. I am certain I can understand the most difficult material presented in the readings for this course.
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The full inventory was translated into Finnish by one of the researchers, back-trans-lated into English by a person not associated with the study, and the English versionchecked against the original by another researcher. The original English and back-translated versions of the inventory were very similar, with only one item being slightlydifferent, and the difference was considered not to have affected the item meaning.
In the first study, 132 responses from Oxford and 171 responses from Helsinki,which contained a clear indication of the disciplinary context, were combined. In thesecond study, the group of Finnish teachers were given two inventories and they wereasked to select two different kinds of courses or teaching contexts. First, these teach-ers were asked to answer the items keeping in mind their most usual teaching contextand, second, to answer the same items on a second inventory focusing on another lessusual kind of context. Furthermore, they were asked to name the course in each caseand to report why they considered the selected courses were different. In order to helpthe teachers to describe the difference between the courses, they were asked to reportthe number of students, the main method of teaching and the study phase of thestudents. Of 204 teachers, 22 returned only one questionnaire. Thus, for this studyon the effect of context on approaches to teaching, a total of 182 matched pairs ofcompleted inventories were available.
Data analyses
The disciplinary differences in teachers’ approaches to teaching were analysed byapplying independent samples t-tests and one-way analyses of variance.
The shift in the conceptual change/student-focused (CCSF) and informationtransfer/teacher-focused (ITTF) approaches to teaching from one teaching context toanother was analysed by computing ‘change variables’ for each approach. This wasdone by subtracting the teachers’ approach scale scores when they were respondingabout a teaching context they sometimes teach (less usual context in Table 2) from thescores when responding about the most usual teaching context (usual context inTable 2). In both change variables the magnitude and the direction of the shift fromthe most usual to the less usual teaching context was used to create five categories of
Table 2. Categories of the change variables
The direction of change Explanation Difference in scores
Strong negative change Scores in the less usual context clearly higher than in the usual context
−1.00 or more negative
Negative change Scores in the less usual context higher than in the usual context
From −0.5 up to −1.0
No change or minor change Scores in both contexts equal or similar Between −0.5 and 0.5Positive change Scores in the less usual context lower
than in the usual contextFrom 0.5 up to 1.0
Strong positive change Scores in the less usual context clearly lower than in the usual context
1.00 or greater
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change based on Likert scale point changes of greater or less than a half a Likert scalepoint. This procedure was used by Eley (1992) in investigating change, with context,of student approaches to learning. In his study, Eley used one Likert scale point,but this was considered to be insufficiently discriminating for the present study.Categorisation on the basis of median split was also considered, but that would havemade it impossible to compare the changes in CCSF and ITTF approaches from oneteaching context to another.
The significance of the changes in the CCSF and ITTF approaches to teachingfrom one teaching context to another were tested by the Wilcoxon signed ranks test(Siegel & Castellan, 1988, pp. 87–95). This test is a nonparametric alternative to thepaired t-test. The test assumes that there is information in the magnitudes of thedifferences between paired observations, as well as the signs.
Results
The relations between discipline and approaches to teaching and self-efficacy
For the analysis of the first study, only those inventories returned by teachers whodescribed a typical or usual teaching context were used. Of a possible 340 teachers,303 (89%) had given sufficient information on their discipline. First, in order tocompare our results with those found by Lueddeke (2003), the disciplines wereassigned to two categories, namely, ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences. An independentsamples t-test showed that the teachers from hard sciences scored significantly higheron the ITTF approach scale than the teachers from soft sciences (t[300] = 3.58, p <.001). Another independent samples t-test showed that the teachers from softsciences scored significantly higher on the CCSF approach scale than teachers fromhard sciences (t[300] = −4,54, p < .001).
In a second analysis, the disciplines of the 303 responses were assigned to four cate-gories by applying Biglan’s (1973) ‘pure hard’, ‘pure soft’, ‘applied hard’ and ‘appliedsoft’ categories. The frequencies of the four categories of disciplines (and exampledisciplines) can be seen in Table 3. The final column of Table 3 also shows the signif-icance testing of the means of sum scales, measuring approaches to teaching andteachers’ self-efficacy beliefs.
Table 3. Significance testing of means of approaches to teaching and self-efficacy beliefs by discipline (n = 303)
Scale
Pure hard(e.g. chemistry)
(n = 39)M
Pure soft(e.g. history)
(n = 76)M
Applied hard(e.g. medicine)
(n = 97)M
Applied soft(e.g. education)
(n = 91)M F (p)
CCSF 3.41 4.01 3.62 3.86 8.45 (0.000)ITTF 3.04 2.81 3.26 2.97 5.90 (0.001)Self efficacy 4.24 4.16 3.99 4.14 1.76 (0.154)
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These results show that the means of the ITTF and CCSF approach scales differedsignificantly across the disciplinary groups, and that there is no significant variationin self-efficacy beliefs.
Bonferroni’s post hoc test with its significant difference procedure (α = 0.05) wasused for comparisons of the means of the CCSF approach scale among the four disci-pline groups. The comparisons showed that responses from the ‘pure hard’ disciplin-ary group scored significantly lower on the CCSF scale than the responses from ‘puresoft’ and ‘applied soft’ groups. Moreover, responses from the ‘applied hard’ groupscored significantly lower on the CCSF scale than the responses from the ‘pure soft’group. The comparisons further showed that the responses from the ‘applied hard’group scored significantly higher on the ITTF scale than those from the ‘pure soft’and ‘applied soft’ groups.
On the self-efficacy scale, teachers from ‘pure hard’ sciences scored the highest, butthe differences among the four categories did not reach the significant level. However,one-way analysis of variance revealed significant differences in the self-efficacy beliefsof teachers at the faculty level in the Finnish sample (F = (10,193) = 2.86, p = .003)(see Table 4).
Bonferronis’ post hoc test, with its significant difference procedure (α = 0.05),showed that the teachers from the Faculty of Sciences scored significantly higher onthe self-efficacy scale than teachers from the Faculties of Law, Social Sciences,Agriculture and Forestry, and Veterinary Medicine.
The relations between teaching context and approaches to teaching
For the second study, the Finnish teachers completed two inventories. The firstinventory response represents the way the teachers usually teach and the secondinventory response the way they sometimes teach. The effect of teaching context wasanalysed at the level of the individual teacher by exploring the shift in approaches to
Table 4. Significance testing of means of self-efficacy beliefs by faculty (n = 194)
Faculty n M
Theology 14 3.93Law 15 3.84Medicine 18 4.17Arts 29 4.09Sciences 20 4.59Education 9 4.33Social Sciences 22 3.94Agriculture and Forestry 36 3.89Veterinary Medicine 19 3.92Pharmacy 9 4.06School of Economics and Business Administration
3 3.83
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Approaches to teaching 293
teaching scale scores from one teaching context to another by using the change vari-ables described in the method section.
The context-specificity of the approaches to teaching was analysed in more detailby using the two change variables. The teachers’ change scores on both CCSF andITTF approaches from the usual teaching context to the context they sometimesteach varied. The change in the CCSF approach scores varied from −2.25 to 2.25,and for the ITTF approach from −2.13 to 2.75 on the 1–5 point scale. Negativevalues indicate that the scores of the approaches were higher in the teaching contextteachers sometimes teach than in the more usual context. Conversely, positive scoresindicate that the scores of the approaches were lower in the teaching context teacherssometimes teach than in the more usual context. The correlation between the CCSFand ITTF approach change variables was statistically significant (r = −.519, p ≤ .001).Table 5 shows distributions of these change variables.
Table 5 shows that the teachers’ scores on the ITTF approach scale did notchange at all or changed only slightly from one teaching context to another in59.3% of the cases. In contrast, only 39% of teachers’ scores on the CCSFapproach scale stayed the same or changed only slightly. The table also shows that40.7% of the teachers had either a clearly higher or higher CCSF approach scalescore when having in mind the less usual teaching context they sometimes teach,and 20.3% of the teachers had either a clearly lower or lower CCSF approachscale score when thinking about this less usual teaching context. Similarly, 17.6%of the teachers had either a clearly higher or higher ITTF approach scale scorewhen having in mind the teaching context they sometimes teach, and 23.1% of theteachers had either a clearly lower or lower ITTF approach scale score whenthinking about this less usual teaching context. In all, about one-third of the teach-ers showed strong positive or negative changes in the CCSF approach scale scoresfrom one teaching context to another. However, there were fewer teachers whoshowed strong changes in the ITTF approach scale scores, with less than one-fifthof the teachers showing strong positive or negative changes. A more detailed analy-sis of the change in scores on the ITTF and CCSF approaches scales from onecontext to another showed that there was only one teacher whose scores did notchange at all (in either CCSF, ITTF approaches or both) from one teachingcontext to another.
Table 5. Percentages of teachers who changed ITTF and CCSF approaches between the most usual teaching context and the context teachers sometimes teach (n = 182)
Direction of change % ITTF % CCSF
Scores in the less usual context clearly higher than in the usual context 8.8 20.9Scores in the less usual context higher than in the usual context 8.8 19.8No change or minor change 59.3 39.0Scores in the less usual context lower than in the usual context 13.2 8.8Scores in the less usual context clearly lower than in the usual context 9.9 11.5
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The Wilcoxon signed ranks test was used in order to analyse the significance of therelations between the teaching context and teachers’ approaches to teaching. TheCCSF approach scores in usual and less usual teaching contexts changed significantly(z = −3.21, p = .001) between two teaching contexts. Sixty-six teachers had higherscores on the CCSF approach to teaching in the usual teaching context and 106teachers had higher scores on the CCSF approach to teaching in the less usual teach-ing context. Ten teachers had no difference in their scores on the CCSF approach toteaching in two teaching contexts. The sum of the positive ranks (9537.00) wasgreater than the sum of negative ranks (5341.00), revealing that the teachers hadhigher scores in the CCSF approach to teaching in the less usual teaching contextthan in the usual teaching context. Teachers’ ITTF scores did not change signifi-cantly in the two teaching contexts. Ninety-four teachers had higher scores on theITTF approach to teaching in the usual teaching context and 77 teachers had higherscores on the ITTF approach to teaching in the less usual teaching context. Eleventeachers did not have any change in their scores on the ITTF approach to teaching.
The results were also analysed using t-tests to gauge the mean difference betweenthe two teaching contexts for the whole group. They showed that when given a choiceof describing another context that is not their usual context, on average, over allacademic staff, the respondents describe more of a CCSF approach (t[181] = −3.12,p = .002) in the less usual context, but with no significant change in the ITTFapproach (t[181] = 1.02, p = .311).
Discussion
The results of the two studies showed that there was variation in student- and teacher-focused approaches across disciplines and across teaching contexts. Thus, the resultsempirically confirm the relational origins of teachers’ approach to teaching (Prosser& Trigwell, 1999). In other words, teachers who experience different contexts mayadopt different approaches to teaching in those different contexts. The strong nega-tive correlations between the two change variables show that, when CCSFapproaches are increased, the ITTF approaches are reduced, and vice versa.
There was evidence that approaches to teaching were related to teachers’ disci-pline. Teachers from ‘hard’ disciplines were more likely to report a more teacher-focused approach to teaching, whereas those teaching ‘soft’ disciplines were morestudent-focused. This result is in line with previous research by Lueddeke (2003) andTrigwell (2002). However, a closer look, using the hard–soft, pure–applied categoriesof Becher (1989) and Biglan (1973), did not reveal significant differences in theapproaches to teaching between the ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ groups of either ‘hard’ disci-plines or ‘soft’ disciplines. This indicates that there were more differences betweenapproaches to teaching of teachers from ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ disciplines than within thesetwo groups when divided into ‘pure’ and ‘applied’ subgroups. This quantitativelyderived result is consistent with the qualitative studies of Neumann et al. (2002),who describe teaching in ‘hard’ disciplines as involving mainly mass lectures andproblem-based seminars, or as focused on simulations and case studies in relation to
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professional settings, while in the ‘soft’ disciplines there are more face-to-face classmeetings and tutorial teaching including discussions and debates.
The results from this study showed no significant variation in self-efficacy beliefs ofteachers across the four disciplinary categories. However, comparisons at the facultylevel for the Finnish sample showed that teachers from the Faculty of Sciencesreported the highest self-efficacy scores. In this respect, the results of the presentstudy differ from the results of Bailey’s study (1999), in which no differences in self-efficacy beliefs of teachers from different faculties were found. The reasons for thehigh self-efficacy beliefs of teachers from the Faculty of Sciences may reside in thenature of their epistemological beliefs and the cumulative nature of knowledge in‘pure hard’ disciplines (Neumann et al., 2002). From this it may follow that teachersfrom the Faculty of Sciences feel themselves more certain as teachers than teachersfrom other faculties, because of the linear and ‘straightforward’ teaching content.However, more research is needed in order to explain in more depth the effect ofdiscipline on self-efficacy beliefs of teachers.
The contextual variation in the approaches to teaching seemed interrelated in thatwhen the scores in the student-focused approach increased, the scores in the teacher-focused approach decreased and, respectively, when the student-focused scoresdecreased, the teacher-focused scores increased. Even though both student- andteacher-focused approaches varied from one teaching context to another, the student-focused approach seemed more sensitive to contextual effects.
Interestingly, teachers more often reported higher scores on the CCSF approachscale in the less usual context than in the usual teaching context. In contrast, teachersscored higher in the ITTF scale in the usual teaching context more often than in theless usual context. These results suggest that most academic staff have an awarenessof a more student-focused approach, and, if the context of their ‘less usual teaching’became the context of their ‘usual teaching’, then student learning might beimproved. In other words, the results point to the possibility that the development ofteachers’ approaches to teaching towards more student-centred approaches may betriggered by a focus on the courses teachers might see as less mainstream. In the lessusual teaching context teachers are possibly more open to new ideas and new teachingmethods. Furthermore, the class size might be smaller, giving teachers more possibil-ities for using student-centred teaching methods.
Conversely, lower CCSF approach scores in the less mainstream context mightreflect perceptions of that context being less interesting. Further study of the teachers’explanations of the choices is needed to clarify this issue.
As evidence shows that teachers’ approaches to teaching are related to the qualityof students’ learning (Trigwell et al., 1999), the results of the present study offer thepossibility that one way of improving student learning is to support teachers in devel-oping more student-centred approaches to teaching. However, when aiming at astudent-centred approach to teaching in all teaching contexts, rapid changes in theuse of different approaches to teaching cannot be expected. Postareff et al. (2004)have shown that only after a long process of pedagogical training does the shift inteaching generally from a teacher-centred to a student-centred approach take place.
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In our sample only one teacher showed no change in her mean scores for ITTF andCCSF approaches when reporting her approaches to teaching in two different teach-ing contexts. This provides strong empirical evidence for the view that, rather thanapproaches to teaching being stable (Kember & Kwan, 2002), teachers change theirapproaches to teaching according to their perceptions of their situation (Samuelowicz& Bain, 1992, 2001; Prosser & Trigwell, 1999).
In concluding, we note a paradox (and a potential limitation) in relation to the firstof these studies. We aimed in the first study to explore disciplinary differences inapproaches to teaching, and we found meaningful differences. In the second studyour aim was to explore the relational nature of the ATI, and we were able to provideempirical evidence for the context-specificity of teachers’ approaches to teaching.This result suggests that the same teacher in different contexts may adopt a differentapproach to teaching, and is the reason why Prosser and Trigwell (1999, p. 177)have argued that, because of the relational nature of approaches to teaching, it maynot be meaningful to look at comparisons of mean scores for the CCSF and ITTFapproach scales across different contexts. We attempted to overcome the problemthis result causes for the first study (analysis of the disciplinary differences inapproaches to teaching) by using teachers’ reports when thinking of their usual, or‘normal’, teaching context. While analysing ‘normal’ teaching contexts cannot totallyremove the effect of the relational nature of approaches to teaching, it is likely to‘dampen’ the relational effect. Thus, we have been able to provide evidence for boththe relational nature of the approaches to teaching as well as underlying disciplinarydifferences.
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