Beliefs and needs of academic teachers: a latent class analysis
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Beliefs and needs of academic teachers: a latent class analysis Silvia Bacci1
· Bruno Bertaccini1 · Alessandra Petrucci1
Accepted: 12 October 2019 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract In the last few years, academic guidance services of the Italian universities have been increasingly involved in planning and organising training courses for academic teachers to improve the quality of teaching. In such a context, it is important to collect information on the teachers’ opinions about their belief on traditional and innovative approaches to teaching and learning evaluation as well as on their need of support to take effective teaching practices. In this contribution we aim at studying the structure of academic teachers’ population of an Italian university in order to detect groups of teachers that are homogenous in terms of beliefs and needs. As beliefs and needs may be conceptualised in terms of an unobservable (or latent) variable composed of multiple traits related with different aspects of beliefs and needs (e.g., passion for teaching, beliefs about teaching methods, …), the proposed analysis is based on a multidimensional Latent Class Item Response Theory model. This type of model allows us to classify teachers in latent classes with respect to their beliefs and needs in the academic didactic activities. Moreover, it also allows us to identify specific aspects of teaching with respect to which academic teachers tend to disagree/agree, and to relate beliefs and needs of teachers with their individual characteristics. The study involves a sample of academic teachers coming from the University of Florence (IT) that took part in a survey based on a new questionnaire composed of Likert-type items concerning beliefs and needs on several aspects of teaching. Keywords Graded response model · Higher education · Item response theory · Latent class analysis · Multidimensionality
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Silvia Bacci [email protected] Dipartimento di Statistica, Informatica, Applicazioni “Giuseppe Parenti”, Florence Center for Data Science, Università degli Studi di Firenze, Viale Morgagni 59, 50134 Firenze, Italy
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1 Introduction In Italy, the overall modernisation processes of the university system that have characterised the ministerial policies of the last decades are contributing to the spread of the culture of evaluation. The internal evaluation systems adopted by the various universities are, to date, able to provide lot of information that should lead to an overall continuous improvement consistent with the missions in which each academic institution is engaged (historically didactics and research, to which the valorisation of knowledge has been recently added, in order to increase the economic growth of the society). For an effective improvement of the university system, nowadays it is necessary to reconsider the relationship between these missions, because it is on this relationship that the university dynamics have been historically structured. The research is the engine of t
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