Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education: An Evaluation of The Impact of Faculty Development Programmes

This paper evaluates the impact of a faculty development (FD) programme implemented in an Italian university during the 2022/2023 academic year. The programme consisted of a series of lectures and workshops focused on the implementation of innovative and inclusive teaching practices for university professors and secondary school teaching staff. The initiatives covered a wide spectrum of topics, including educational tools to address learning barriers, innovative and inclusive teaching methodologies, interactivity enhancement, and the use of digital technologies in teaching. To assess the impact of the training sessions on university professors, the evaluation model proposed by Kirkpatrick was employed. Kirkpatrick’s model is an internationally recognized tool that provides a conceptual framework for analysing the results of educational, training and learning programmes, focusing on four levels of evaluation: Reaction, Learning, Behaviour, and Results. In line with the reference literature, we evaluated the impact of training sessions on the basis of a questionnaire that was submitted to all participants of training events and that was explicitly aimed at reproducing the four levels of evaluation of Kirkpatrick’s model. The questionnaire included a plurality of indicators that were then aggregated into the four levels creating distinct variables of high internal consistency (as detected by their respective Cronbach’s alpha). Our results show a positive impact of training on university teachers for all four levels of evaluation. More specifically, the highest values arise for the first and second levels of evaluation (Reaction and Learning), while lower values arise for the third and fourth levels (Behaviour and Results). Different effects also emerge according to the career stage of the participants (young researchers, associate professors, full professors) and changes in adopted teaching methodologies arise between pre and post training activities.