Knowledge, attitudes, and growth among university professors

Abstract

Background: Higher education institutions (HEIs) get this ongoing push to line up graduate competencies with economic, ecological, and sustainability expectations from a job market that is changing fast, and also it is kind of multidisciplinary. To deal with that, there is a need for faculty who have solid teaching ability, the right “dispositions”, and continuous professional growth across teaching, research, and service. Still, even now, there is limited clarity among faculty about how well students are really prepared to make it in an increasingly connected and multicultural global setting. Objective: The goal of this study was to look at how faculty competencies, dispositions, and professional development shape classroom practice and also student academic progress in higher education. Method: We used a sequential mixed-methods approach, meaning quantitative and qualitative data were combined, to explore faculty self-views, student views, tenure status, research advancement, plus differences across disciplines, in relation to instructional quality and student results. Result: Faculty scored their own competencies and dispositions more positively than students did. Faculty representatives also suggested that lecturers who were not yet tenured showed better dispositions and skillsets than their tenured peers. Roughly one third of the professors had completed at least one research advancement requirement. Students in biological sciences also reported higher levels of satisfaction with instructional quality and skill improvement compared with students in social sciences and engineering. Conclusion: The gaps between how faculty rate themselves and how students see things, plus the uneven patterns across tenure status and different disciplines, point to a need to understand more clearly how faculty aptitudes combine with attitudes and ongoing professional development. Overall, these results make it clear that targeted faculty development efforts are important, alongside discipline sensitive teaching approaches, so instructional quality can improve and student outcomes can get better too. In that way the wider aim of preparing graduates with competencies that are economically, ecologically, and socially sustainable is also better supported.