PORTAAL Observations of Teaching Practices in 146 STEM Courses

Aggregating PORTAAL classroom observation data from 146 STEM courses, used to analyze the correlation between teaching practices and student exam performance. It was created by Mallory A. Jackson and last updated in March 2026.

Use Cases

• Analyze the correlation between learner-centered practices (e.g., volunteer or randomly-called students explaining answers) and student exam performance using a linear mixed model.
• Identify teaching practice continua from instruction-centered (e.g., high Bloom's level questions) to learner-centered using principal component analysis.
• Examine interactions of binary gender and first-generation status with learner-centered teaching practices on exam scores.

Strengths

• Data is derived from observations of 146 distinct STEM courses.
• Analysis identifies specific sets of teaching practices, such as instruction-centered and learner-centered.
• The dataset is licensed under CC BY 4.0, allowing for broad reuse.

Limitations

• The dataset is very small at 5.5 KB, indicating limited scope and likely a summary or analysis output rather than raw observational records.
• Specific column definitions and sample data are unavailable, limiting understanding of the data structure.
• The observational focus on STEM courses may limit generalizability to other academic disciplines.

Provenance

Source

Mallory A. Jackson via figshare.

Collection Method

Classroom observations using the PORTAAL tool across 146 STEM courses, followed by principal component analysis and linear mixed modeling.

Freshness

Last updated March 2026.