Experience with Scientific Teaching in Face-to-Face Settings Promoted Usage of Evidence-Based Practices during Emergency Remote Teaching

During the Spring of 2020, instructors across the nation scrambled to transition their face-to-face courses to remote/online modalities. Necessarily, teaching practices adapted. This study investigated how the usage of evidence-based practices as defined by scientific teaching (ST) was impacted during this rapid transition. More than 130 science faculty teaching courses in biology, mostly from primarily undergraduate institutions in the U.S. Midwest, completed the Measurement Instrument of Scientific Teaching (MIST) for one course of their choosing (lecture portion only for laboratory-based courses). Participants compared how they taught the course in the face-to-face versus the remote setting. MIST scores declined in every category of ST. An instructor’s face-to-face MIST score was the largest predictor for the remote MIST score. Fourteen representative participants completed a follow-up interview to discuss how and why they made the changes they did within each ST category. Interviews uncovered variation in how individual practices were emphasized, scheduled, and implemented in normal teaching environments, how access to resources changed in the Spring of 2020, and how all of these things impacted the way ST practices were adopted in emergency remote teaching. Recommendations for mitigating declines in the use of evidence-based teaching in response to future unexpected events are discussed.