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Recent Research in Science Teaching and Learning

In this installment of Current Insights, I highlight three diverse research studies out of psychology journals that address student study strategies, faculty change, and the influence of instructor style on the gap between perceived and actual learning.

This feature is designed to point CBE-Life Sciences Education readers to current or noteworthy articles for life science educators and education researchers. We invite readers to suggest current themes or articles of interest in life science education as well as influential papers published in the more distant past or in the broader field of education research to be featured in Current Insights. Please send any suggestions to Julia.Gouvea@tufts.edu. *Address correspondence to: Sarah L. Eddy (seddy@fiu.edu). © 2018 S. L. Eddy. CBE-Life Sciences Education © 2018 The American Society for Cell Biology. This article is distributed by The American Society for Cell Biology under license from the author(s). It is available to the public under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons License (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0). "ASCB®" and "The American Society for Cell Biology®" are registered trademarks of The American Society for Cell Biology. Chen and colleagues found that the Strategic Resource Use intervention increased overall course grades by one-third of a letter grade relative to the control treatment. In addition, students who completed the intervention consistently performed significantly higher on all the exams except for exam 1. Students in the intervention group also reported significantly more self-reflection on their learning, and the more self-reflection they engaged in, the more useful they found the resources they used to study. One might predict that being exposed to the checklist might mean that students in the treatment group were simply using more resources to study than students in the control group, who did not see the checklist. However, students in the treatment group actually used fewer resources. This finding supports the main hypothesis of the paper: students in the intervention group used resources more strategically. Additional support comes from student responses to the open-ended questions. Writing about four study strategies seemed to be associated with increased course performance: tailoring choice of resources to study from to exam format; choosing resources based on their ability to increase understanding of content; setting when a resource will be used; and planning how to use that resource.
Thus, Chen and colleagues demonstrate through a well-controlled and well-designed experiment that instructors can reduce potential frustration by helping their students become more strategic in their studying through a short online intervention. Although effective teaching practices are well documented, not all faculty employ them. Stupnisky and colleagues explore whether different types of motivation for teaching predict the use of best practices. Specifically, they apply Ryan and Deci's (2017) self-determination theory to this question. In this theory, motivation ranges from autonomous, which is similar to intrinsic motivation, wherein something is done for enjoyment and satisfaction, to external regulation, wherein something is done because of factors outside of the self, such as rewards and costs. To achieve the most optimal form of motivation, autonomous motivation, individuals must feel competent in their environment, relate to others, and experience a sense of choice. When these psychological needs are not met, individuals are more likely to be on the more external regulation end of the motivation spectrum. Based on this theory, Stupnisky and colleagues posit that faculty who have their needs for autonomy, relatedness, and competency met will feel more autonomous motivation for teaching, and that autonomous motivation in turn will be more likely to predict the use of best practices.

FACULTY CHANGE
Researchers distributed a survey to faculty at 19 different universities and colleges across a range of institution types (doctoral-, master's-, and bachelor's-granting institutions; public and private [not for profit]) and disciplines. More than 1500 faculty replied to the survey (46% response rate). Faculty responded to items that addressed 1) the motivation faculty experience for their teaching; 2) the extent to which their psychological needs are met at work; and 3) their use of four teaching best practices: instructional clarity, higher-order learning, reflective and integrative learning, and collaborative learning. Structural equation models were applied to theses to test whether the fulfillment of psychological needs predicted autonomous teaching motivation, and whether autonomous teaching motivation was more likely than external teaching motivation to predict use of best practices. Although researchers did find small differences in how motivation and psychological needs predicted the use of best practices between different institution types, I will only discuss the results pooled across institution types.
Autonomous (intrinsic) motivation had a positive and significant relationship with the use of all four best practices. External motivation was unrelated to the use of best practices. Thus, to most consistently promote the use of best practices in teaching, these results suggest it is better to focus on building autonomous motivation (enjoyment, satisfaction) for teaching rather than using external motivations (tenure and promotion, teaching awards, etc.). The authors acknowledge that not everyone may come to enjoy teaching, but they can begin to recognize its importance. Being motivated by the value of teaching is so close to autonomous motivation that working toward this will lead to equally strong change.
In addition, Stupnisky and colleagues found that fulfillment of autonomy, competence, and relatedness needs predicted an increase autonomous motivation. There was no relationship between need fulfillment and external motivation. Thus, efforts to increase the use of best practices might include elements that fulfill these psychological needs. On the basis of these findings, the authors suggest possible elements of faculty development or change initiatives, including providing faculty with choice in course selection (autonomy), providing professional development and time to prepare their courses (competency), and facilitating a sense of community or connection between faculty and their students and colleagues (relatedness). Motivation frameworks, therefore, can be useful for considering the design of interventions and can help identify leverage points that promote the use of best teaching practices. To study effectively, students need to accurately assess what they know and what they do not know. Unfortunately, many factors can influence a student's ability to do this. In this study, Toftness and colleagues explore the influence of "fluency." In this context, fluency is defined as how easy something appears to be to learn. Specifically, the authors focus on how the presentation style of a faculty member could influence students' ability to accurately self-assess their knowledge.

LECTURING STYLE AND STUDENT OVERCONFIDENCE
For this study, researchers focused exclusively on lecturing methodologies. They created two 31-minute videos on information theory in which an instructor said the same things, used the same visuals, and presented material at the same rate, but the style of delivery was different. In the fluency