| This quantitative research study examined the extent to which adjunct professors in colleges and universities within the five counties surrounding, and including Philadelphia County, (a) perceived that they have applied the six effective teaching principles as identified by Ramsden (2003), and (b) how they also perceived that they have been educationally prepared to implement such principles. A purposeful sampling of adjunct professors who teach or reside in the five Pennsylvania counties surrounding, and including, Philadelphia County was conducted to collect all quantitative data for this study. An on-line electronic, eighty question sampling was used with a researcher-designed electronic survey instrument, "Effective Teaching Principles Usage by Adjunct Professors", which also incorporated nine distractor questions to disrupt participant developed response sets and using SurveyMonkey.com software. Pilot testing of the researcher-designed survey was conducted with purposefully selected volunteer adjunct professors. Internal consistency reliability was determined using the Kruder-Richardson and Cronbach's Alpha analysis of the pilot test data which produced an internal consistency coefficient of 0.94, well above the acceptable level of 0.80. Data analysis was conducted using descriptive and inferential statistics in conjunction with the Survey Monkey software, Microsoft Excel, and SPSS 22 statistics analytic software for Microsoft. Pie charts, tables, and graph plots were developed to show frequency distributions derived from the participant survey as well as t-tests for the significance of the correlational coefficients. The relationships between dependent variables, independent variables and hypotheses were analyzed using quantitative, descriptive, and inferential statistical procedures to include regression, and t-tests. Results of this study were analyzed to determine which differences exist between faculty with a professional teaching degree and those without a professional teaching degree and the extent to which they perceive they implement effective teaching practices in their classrooms. |
