Effectiveness of a Workshop To Encourage Action: Evaluation from a Post-Workshop Survey

Professional development workshops are a typical mechanism for disseminating curricular reforms. Follow-up surveys can be administered to provide information that allows the would-be reformers to consider their effectiveness, but often that information stays within the particular curriculum reform project and is not disseminated. Curricular reforms relevant for college chemistry are now relatively common. As a case in point, a set of workshops was offered by the ChemConnections systemic change initiative as part of the initiative's overall dissemination plan. The workshops were intended both to promote teaching with ChemConnections modules and to provide experience with nontraditional pedagogies supported by the modules. This report describes an evaluation of the effectiveness of this set of workshops as derived from a time-delayed post-workshop survey. The article includes a brief description of the curricular reform and the workshops, as well as the information the survey provided about the perceived effectiveness of the reform. Several factors that might be related to workshop effectiveness for this set of workshops are also discussed. With the increasing national presence of workshops to disseminate curricular reforms for college chemistry, we offer this article as a model for interpreting post-workshop survey data for a larger audience interested in reform.