Closeness in a physics faculty online learning community predicts impacts in self-efficacy and teaching

TL;DR

This study shows that in an online physics faculty community, closer connections among members are linked to higher self-efficacy and perceived teaching improvements, highlighting the importance of social proximity for effective professional development.

Contribution

It identifies closeness as a key network measure predicting faculty engagement and perceived benefits in an online physics community, offering insights for community design.

Findings

Closeness correlates with self-efficacy and teaching improvement.

Faculty interactions are crucial for successful professional development.

Network analysis can inform resource prioritization in community design.

Abstract

Community-based professional development initiatives have been shown to support physics faculty in their adoption of research-based instructional strategies. Hoping to better understand these initiatives' mechanisms of success, we analyze the results of two surveys administered to a faculty online learning community teaching a common physics curriculum designed primarily for pre-service elementary teachers. We use social network analysis to represent the faculty network and compare members' centrality, a family of measures that capture the prominence of individuals within a network, to their reported experience in the community. We use a principal component analysis of different centrality measures to show that closeness, a measure of how closely connected a person is with every other person in their network, is the most appropriate centrality measure for our network. We then compare regression models according to Bayes factors to find relationships between participants' closeness and their survey responses. We find that participants' self-efficacy, as well as their sense of improvement to their teaching and sense of benefitting from the community, are predictors of their closeness with other participants and thus their breadth and depth of participation in the community. Our results are consistent with other studies that have highlighted interactions among faculty as key components of successful professional development initiatives. They may also be useful for designers of similar communities as they decide how to prioritize time and resources to meet specific goals.