Becca Price publishes “Capturing instructor complexity with persona methodology”

IAS faculty member Becca Price and her colleague Tati Russo-Tait (The University of Texas at Austin) have published a set of annotations that introduce scholars to biology education research. The original paper (by Zagallo et al.) develops personas of instructors participating in professional development around teaching.

The authors interviewed faculty participants, and then used the content of those interviews to create profiles that describe the beliefs and practices of different groups of faculty. They also observed how the instructors they interviewed taught to see how beliefs and practices aligned. Thinking about the resulting personas can help create better faculty development by implementing strategies that are effective with different groups of people.

The annotations by Price and Russo-Tait, along with paper authors Zagallo and Lemons (University of Georgia), expand the toolbox for biology education researches who integrate qualitative and quantitative analyses.