Making meaning of data: Exploring representations of classroom activities from a first year engineering course

Real-time, pedagogical feedback can be useful for instructors and graduate teaching assistants in assessing the effectiveness of their instructional activities. This is especially useful in first-year engineering classes, where laboratory and team activities may be more common. The G-RATE, Global Real-Time Assessment Tool for Teaching Enhancement, is a tool to provide research-based feedback for instructors about their classroom interactions across four areas based on the "How People Learn" framework¹: knowledge-centeredness, community centeredness, learner-centeredness, and assessment-centeredness. The G-RATE provides a teaching profile across these categories, as well as a chronological profile of teaching interactions. Given the huge amounts of classroom data captured over large spans of time, the process of effectively representing the depth and breadth of classroom activities becomes messy. How can data be represented in a detailed, meaningful manner that can inform educators' teaching practices? Using data collected among 7 instructors in a first-year engineering course at a large Midwestern university, the authors present an overview of data collection techniques used to inform faculty about their pedagogical instruction. Implications for translating this data into feedback are presented along with sample profiles of faculty instruction using the G-RATE.