Do course syllabi reflect observed teaching practices in undergraduate geoscience courses?

Syllabi are an important communication tool that can convey information about a course, including pedagogical strategies instructors intend to use. The material in course syllabi is thought to reflect such factors as instructors’ professional development and prior teaching experiences, both of which influence beliefs about teaching. These factors also influence how in-class instruction occurs. However, the extent to which syllabi predict instruction has not been explored in detail, despite the fact that students rely on syllabi to gain logistical information as well as first impressions about an instructor and the course. Given this, we designed a study to examine alignment between syllabi and in-class instruction, and explore the possibility of using syllabi as an alternative to resource heavy classroom observations. We created a syllabus rubric and scored 155 course syllabi from previously observed geoscience courses. Scored syllabi were collected as part of classroom observations we completed using the Reformed Teaching Observation Protocol (RTOP) from 2012 to 2019. After finding a low correlation between syllabi rubric scores and RTOP observation scores, regression modeling with k-fold cross validation was used to assess how accurately RTOP scores could be predicted from course syllabi and determine if a subset of specific items in our syllabus rubric could be used to better predict teaching practices. Our final model had low predictive ability (r² = 0.296), but we found that four out of 29 syllabi items related to active learning, percentage of course grade from exams, metacognitive activities, and high-level learning outcomes were most predictive of teaching practices. This work suggests that syllabi do not strongly predict the teaching practices used in geosciences classrooms. We recommend that faculty use syllabi as an opportunity to reflect on and document their teaching practices so that syllabi are more descriptive of the instruction that students can expect in their courses.