Faculty Adoption of CS Education Innovations: Exploring Continued Use

Studies on faculty adoption typically focus on the awareness and trial stages: how instructors find out about a new teaching practice and why they decide to try it. While this knowledge is important, reform is unlikely to occur if innovations are only used experimentally; we need to understand why faculty sustain their use. To that end, this study draws on data from a two-phase project in the U.S. to examine why computer science (CS) faculty continue or discontinue use of a practice after the initial trial. In the first phase, we interviewed and observed 66 CS faculty from various institutional settings to explore theory-driven themes. From these results, in the second phase, we collected survey data from 821 faculty at 595 institutions. In this paper, we briefly discuss qualitative results, and then use quantitative data to model what impact the following factors have on sustaining use: achieved benefits for students' performance and their satisfaction in CS, the perception of usefulness to the instructor, student feedback, and ease of use. Results indicate that benefits to students' performance are paramount in predicting continued use. We also explore why faculty abandon a practice, finding that the decision often relates to not achieving desired outcomes and, in some cases, students not making a good faith effort to do their part. We observed that the latter experience can engender negative beliefs about students-that they have, at best, a passive attitude toward their learning. Implications for encouraging sustained usage of innovative teaching techniques are discussed.