Lecturers’ Approaches to Teaching and their Relationship to Conceptions of Good Teaching

By David Kember, K. Kwan. 2000

631 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Previous research has established a close link between students'conceptions of learning, approaches to study and learning outcomes.Until recently, there have been few studies of lecturers' approaches toteaching in higher education and their relationship with conceptions ofteaching. This study aimed to characterise the alternative approaches toteaching of university lecturers, and to examine the relationshipbetween lecturers' approaches to teaching and their conceptions of goodteaching. This study adopted an open naturalistic approach. Seventeenlecturers in three departments in a university were selected forinterview based on their rank, years of teaching and industrial orprofessional experience. Lecturers were interviewed individually abouttheir conceptions of good teaching, motivational strategies andeffective teaching. The interview records were then content analysed bythe two researchers of the study. The study found that (a) it waspossible to characterise lecturers' approaches to teaching with onemotivation and five strategy dimensions; (b) the conceptions of teachingof the lecturers were best described by two main orientations oftransmissive and facilitative teaching; (c) lecturers who conceivedteaching as transmitting knowledge were more likely to usecontent-centred approaches to teaching, while those who conceivedteaching as facilitative tended to use learning-centred approaches. Thestudy concludes by suggesting that fundamental changes to the quality ofteaching and learning are unlikely to happen without changes tolecturers' conception of teaching.

Subfields: Education, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/525e8d2c8a6b9f7b357c265521e6cbad0d0d1abe

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In Management of Technology and Innovation

Citations in the corpus

Tensions in beginning teachers’ professional identity development, accompanying feelings and coping strategies (2013, neutral): “Teachers can, for example, adhere to a content-centered or a learning-centered approach to teaching (Kember and Kwan 2000).”
Improving higher education practice through student evaluation systems: is the student voice being heard? (2014, background): “…need to do to improve, if the lecturer does not understand how such remarks can be used to make them a stronger practitioner, and, without lecturers reflecting and reconceptualising their teaching, fundamental change in the quality of their practice is unlikely to happen (Kember and Kwan 2000).”
In their own words: a qualitative study of the reasons Australian university students plagiarize (2007, methodology): “In the present study, as in the process used to categorize responses outlined by Kember and Kwan (2000), the responses to the question about reasons for plagiarism were examined in the light of the summary of the whole interview to ensure the researcher’s interpretations were put into context.”
The benefits of peer observation of teaching for tutor development (2008, background): “These studies show two main conceptions and approaches to teaching, namely teacher-focussed conception with a content-centred approach and student-focussed conception with a learning-centred approach (Martin and Ramsden 1992; Halliday and Soden 1998; Kember and Kwan 2000 ; A ˚ kerlind 2003, 2007; M”
The influence of teachers’ teaching approaches on students’ learning approaches: the student perspective (2013, methodology): “A few studies identified the relation between teachers’ approaches to teaching and students’ approaches to learning (Trigwell et al. 1998; Trigwell, Prosser, and Waterhouse 1999; Kember and Kwan 2002).”
Facilitating change in undergraduate STEM instructional practices: An analytic review of the literature (2011, background): “For example, Kember and Kwan (2000) used interviews with faculty to identify a strong correlation between conceptions of teaching and approaches to teaching.”
Teaching with technology in higher education: understanding conceptual change and development in practice (2017, background): “There are an increasing number of studies that examine teachers ’ approaches to teaching and their conceptions of teaching in HE (Biggs, 1999; Kember & Kwan, 2000; Kirkwood & Price, 2012).”