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Research University STEM Faculty Members’ Motivation to Engage in Teaching Professional Development: Building the Choir Through an Appeal to Extrinsic Motivation and Ego

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Abstract

This paper reports on a qualitative, grounded-theory-based study that explored the motivations of science and engineering faculty to engage in teaching professional development at a major research university. Faculty members were motivated to engage in teaching professional development due to extrinsic motivations, mainly a weakened professional ego, and sought to bring their teaching identities in better concordance with their researcher identities. The results pose a challenge to a body of research that has concluded that faculty must be intrinsically motivated to participate in teaching professional development. Results confirmed a pre-espoused theory of motivation, self-determination theory; a discussion of research literature consideration during grounded theory research is offered. A framework for motivating more faculty members at research universities to engage in teaching professional development is provided.

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Notes

  1. In this work, institutions referred to as research universities are classified in the 2006 Carnegie Foundation’s Classification of Institutions of Higher Education as those engaged in very high research activity.

  2. For the purposes of this paper, teaching professional development (TPD) is defined as programs and activities that engage educators in reflection or learning about pedagogy with the goal to improve teaching knowledge or practice.

  3. Many cognitive theorists use both the noun and verb to describe humans’ inherent push towards securing and fostering their own growth.

  4. At the time of the study, the institution ranked in the top five among US public institutions for research expenditures, federally funded research, non-federally funded research, and doctorates granted.

  5. Grounded theorists speak of constructing theory inductively from data. Yet a theory, for a grounded theorist, is not always of the grand nature that is often associated with the term theory. A theory, for the grounded theorist, can explain data associated with a case or set of cases only.

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  1. University of Kentucky, 112 Taylor Education Building, Lexington, KY, 40506, USA

    Jana Bouwma-Gearhart

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  1. Jana Bouwma-Gearhart
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Correspondence to Jana Bouwma-Gearhart.

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Bouwma-Gearhart, J. Research University STEM Faculty Members’ Motivation to Engage in Teaching Professional Development: Building the Choir Through an Appeal to Extrinsic Motivation and Ego. J Sci Educ Technol 21, 558–570 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10956-011-9346-8

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