Community College Anatomy and Physiology Education Research (CAPER): Can Educational Research Drive Pedagogical Change?
Authors: Hull Kerry , Jensen Murray , Gerrits Ron , Ross Kyla , Ott Betsy , Hood Suzanne , Lawford Heather 
Published: June 2021

Human Anatomy and Physiology (A&P) is a required course for many community college (CC) students aiming for careers in health sciences. CC instructors face heavy workloads and few opportunities for professional development. Students face heightened academic and non‐academic challenges which can lead to debilitating anxiety. Traditional instructor‐centered teaching strategies predominate. The result is predictable: an environment where there is high instructor burnout and high student attrition rates. Transitioning to more evidence‐based instructional practices (EBIPs) has been shown to promote student learning. Despite the potential positive impact of this change on CC institutions and their students, widespread adoption of student‐centered strategies remains elusive. Evidence shows change requires more than reading journal articles or attending workshops. The Community College Anatomy and Physiology Education Research (CAPER) project takes an evidence‐based teaching approach to fostering transformation. In each year of the two year project, six CC A&P instructors (two from each of three schools) combine a professional development course with the design, implementation, and dissemination of a small‐scale educational research project investigating the impact of a student‐centered teaching strategy on learning and anxiety.

We are currently in year 1, and six CC instructors have completed the professional development course and project proposals and are implementing their research projects. Participants often assumed that they were required to develop a novel and innovative project using gold‐standard experimental designs and quantitative analyses, and were skeptical about the utility of qualitative measures and experimental designs not involving control groups. In addition to providing access to external experts in qualitative and quantitative analysis, we emphasized that participants could make a contribution to the field by following one of two approaches. First, they could look at less well‐understood impacts of an established EBIP, such as science anxiety, or attempt to validate the effectiveness of an EBIP in on the community college student population. Alternatively, they could investigate a newly developed teaching practice using well‐established data collection methods with the intent of possibly identifying a new EBIP.

While an important goal of CAPER is to produce publishable data regarding the efficacy of EBIPs in CCs, an equally important goal is pedagogical transformation. Thus, softening the rigor of experimental design for our target audience of community college instructors may actually promote scholarly teaching. Data that has a larger noise‐signal ratio than what would be acceptable in traditional research domains may still have a place in educational research, by providing an achievable target for potential novice educational researchers.

Support or Funding Information

This grant is supported by NSF grant #1829157.

This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2019 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.