SUCCEED Faculty Survey of Teaching Practices and Perceptions of Institutional Attitudes toward Teaching, 1999-2000.

SUCCEED (Southeastern University and College Coalition for Engineering Education)is an 8-campus coalition of engineering schools formed in 1992 under the sponsorship of the National Science Foundation. In 1997, members of SUCCEED's faculty development and program assessment teams designed a faculty survey of instructional practices and attitudes regarding the climate for teaching on the Coalition campuses. The respondents were asked about the frequency with which they used various teaching techniques (including active learning, team homework, and technology-assisted instruction), their involvement in faculty development programs, and the effects of those programs on their teaching. They were also asked to rate the importance of teaching quality to themselves, their colleagues, and their department, college, and university administrators and in the faculty reward system in their campus. The survey was first administered late in 1997 and a modified version was administered late in 1997. (A third administration will take place in the spring of 2002.) The 1999 survey was sent by e-mail to 1621 faculty e-mail addresses, and a follow-up survey was sent a month later to non-respondents. After blank surveys and duplicates were eliminated from the returns, 586 valid and usable surveys remained, a return rate of 36%. Of those, 75 were excluded from most analyses (except for demographic summaries) because the respondent had not taught undergraduates in the prior 3 years. The demographic profile of the respondents closely matched that of the full faculty with respect to sex, rank, position, engineering discipline, and participation in SUCCEED-sponsored activities. This report summarizes results from the 1999 administration of the survey and itemizes significant differences among groups (sex, rank, position, years of service, SUCCEED involvement, prior attendance at teaching seminars, and Carnegie classification). When possible, the data are compared with the data from the 1997 survey administration to examine changes in faculty teaching practices and attitudes in the intervening 2 years. Survey instrument and survey summary by institution are appended. (Contains 73 tables and 12 figures.) (Author/MM)