2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Despite the high volume of existing Computer Science Education research, the literature indicates that these evidence-based practices are not making their way into classrooms. While K12 faces pressures from policy and increasing opportunities through professional development to learn these best practices, Higher Education does not have the same accelerants. This paper proposes a variant on a response hierarchy model from marketing literature to illustrate how faculty become aware of and choose to adopt pedagogical interventions. We pose a series of research questions to refine the proposed model. We investigate if the volume of research about an intervention predicts faculty awareness of it. We ask if particular experienced and perceived challenges and benefits of a given intervention affect an intervention’s overall perceived level of benefit or challenge. We then look at which of these variables can predict intent and actual implementation of interventions. Finally, we considered confounding variables such as the unconscious influence of research results and demographic factors to see if there were aspects unaccounted for by the proposed model.
We collected survey data from over 100 faculty members who teach CS in the United States and ran linear regressions, ANOVAs, and Welch’s t-tests, to address our wide range of research questions. Our results suggest that a simplified response hierarchy model holds explanatory power for illustrating how faculty members become aware of and choose to adopt evidence-based teaching interventions. We also found a lack of demographic confounding variables and re-produced that faculty, despite being researchers, are not swayed by education study results. By providing an evidence-based model for how faculty adopt teaching interventions, we offer new insights into how to effectively disseminate research results in a manner that increases the likelihood that the associated teaching interventions are adopted.