2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Doctoral students who choose an academic career path will essentially be required to teach courses. However, literature says most doctoral students have more research experience than teaching experience. Additionally, the teaching experience they have is through their graduate teaching assistantships, which may or may not have associated training on how to teach. Teaching can be difficult if you are not fully aware of the different aspects associated with it. This research project aims at understanding engineering doctoral students’ perceptions on their readiness to teach courses once they begin their academic careers. To understand engineering doctoral students’ perceptions on their preparedness to teach courses, a survey instrument was designed and deployed.

The survey instrument included three parts: Likert scale questions, free response questions, and demographic information. The Likert scale questions evaluate the participants’ confidence/preparedness in areas of teaching such as the teaching and learning process (9 items); course design and delivery (8 items); creating a dynamic classroom (9 items); harnessing the power of technology (6 items); collaborative learning (6 items); and effective assessment (8 items). To collect the content and face validity evidence, the survey was sent to three content experts with expertise in survey design and three potential participants – engineering doctoral students from three different institutions. This study was approved by the Institutional Review Board and the survey instrument was administered in fall 2023. The survey was distributed to approximately 3500 engineering doctoral students from 20 different R1 universities, and 285 responses were included in the analysis post data cleaning and data pre-processing. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) was conducted to validate the factor structure. EFA revealed six factors, five factors were same as hypothesized (the teaching and learning process, course design and delivery, creating a dynamic classroom, collaborative learning, and effective assessment) and one new factor (ethical practices). The factor loadings for the final factors ranged from 0.42 to 0.99, and the internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s α) for the six factors ranged from 0.77 to 0.86, indicating high reliability.