Some background is needed to appreciate this article. The "the Revised Approaches to Teaching Inventory (R-ATI)" is a set of questions used in surveys to help teachers self-report their own practices (eg., a question might be "I think an important reason for running teaching sessions in this subject is to give students a good set of notes"). More here. The questions are taken to measure two sets of factors: "conceptual change/student-focused" (CCSF) and "information transmission/teacher-focused" (ITTF) (which I would interpret as 'constructivist' and 'instructivist' approaches respectively). The responses were then subjected to a graphical analysis to "display partial correlations between any pair of R-ATI items, while controlling for the variance of all other items." Finally, an interpretation of the graph yielded the following conclusion: "academics' conceptions about the subject matter could be the first variable responsible for how academics develop their teaching approach preferences," a relationship that is stable (at least in this Romanian context) across "academic disciplines, class size, academics' gender, and teaching experience".
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