Student response to instructional practices (StRIP) survey in engineering classrooms: Validating a Spanish version

This research paper reports the validity methodology and the results obtained in constructing the Spanish version of a well-known instrument to assess instructional practices. Since 2014, the School of Engineering of the Universidad Andres Bello in Chile has invested resources into transforming teaching practices from a traditional approach to active learning methodologies. To reach this goal, the Educational and Academic Innovation Unit (UNIDA, for its acronym in Spanish) designed a recursive Engineering Faculty Development program that uses the conceptual change approach as a framework. It is specially designed to promote and ensure the use of innovative, active-learning methodologies in Engineering classes. Since 2015, we have been implementing this program and reporting on its evolution and the resulting shifts in paradigm in the teaching practices of the faculty members. All the interventions are done by the faculty (teaching); however, the final impact is on the students (learning). So, we assessed how students responded to these new programs and analyzed the diverse types of teaching implemented by the engineering faculty, using the Student Response to Instructional Practices (StRIP) survey. The StRIP measures students' responses to the kinds of instruction delivered in the undergraduate engineering classrooms. It consists of three main sections: 1) the types of instruction, categorized as interactive, constructive, active, and passive, 2) the strategies underlying the in-class activities, i.e., explanation and facilitation, and 3) the student responses to instruction, as measured in the subscales of value, positivity, participation, distraction, and evaluation. In this paper, we present the process of translating the StRIP from English into Spanish and its subsequent validation. The process included i) forward and backward translation, ii) review by an expert committee, iii) two focus group sessions with engineering students and iv) pilot testing. In the pilot testing, 346 students enrolled in Engineering courses in various semesters of their curricula participated. We used this data to evaluate the internal reliability of the tool using the Cronbach alpha test (α = 0.920), which indicated that our Spanish version of the StRIP was internally consistent. We concluded that the translated version of the StRIP was a validated instrument that could be applied in future formal implementations where the aim is to understand better the students' responses to pedagogical strategies used in Spanish-speaking classrooms.