Structuring Materials to Support Student Learning: Analysis of Instructional Materials from a Professional Development Workshop

Faculty development programs play a crucial role in enhancing learning by equipping educators with the necessary skills, knowledge, and pedagogical strategies to teach more effectively. One such program is the Promoting Active Learning in Analytical Chemistry (PALAC) workshop, which aimed to educate faculty on methods to create and use active learning course materials to support students during the process of learning. This research aimed to assess the design of classroom instructional materials generated by faculty that attended the PALAC workshops. The theories of Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development and scaffolding were used as lenses to characterize the materials because they describe the benefits of providing support through the process of developing knowledge. The active learning materials were analyzed by assigning the cognitive levels of processing, as described by Marzano’s taxonomy, to all questions asked across 134 in-class activities. The use of the cognitive levels of processing allowed the researchers to gauge the presence of scaffolding by tracking how the cognitive levels of processing changed from question to question across each in-class activity. The results from this study indicate that the majority of materials provide opportunities for students to engage with higher-order questions, but there is less evidence for the effective and consistent structuring of the materials. These results have implications for future faculty development programs, suggesting the need to allot more time for faculty to practice developing effective classroom materials. In conjunction, this work demonstrates the effective use of Marzano’s taxonomy in assessing the cognitive structure of in-class activities.