Closeness in a physics faculty online learning community predicts impacts in self-efficacy and teaching

Community-based professional development programs have been shown to support physics faculty in their adoption of research-based instructional strategies. To better understand these programs’ mechanisms of success, we analyze the results of two surveys administered to a faculty online learning community (FOLC) devoted to teaching a common physics curriculum. We assume that curricular implementation is influenced by social connections to other faculty. We use social network analysis to represent the faculty network and compare centralities (a family of measures that capture the prominence of individuals within a network) to their reported experience in the FOLC. We use principal component analysis of different centrality measures to show that closeness is the most predictive centrality measure for our network. We then compare regression models to find relationships between participants’ closeness and their survey responses. We find that participants’ self-efficacy, as well as their senses of teaching improvement and of community benefits, are predictors of their closeness with other participants and thus their breadth and depth of participation in the FOLC. Our results are consistent with other studies that have highlighted interactions among faculty as key components of successful professional development programs. They may also be useful for designers of similar communities as they decide how to prioritize time and resources to meet specific goals.