Professors who are heavily focused on learning how to improve their teaching stand apart as a very distinct subset of college faculties, according to a new study examining how members of the professoriate spend their time.
The study, which sought to classify faculty members in terms of the types of scholarly activity they engage in, also found that those who are focused on tackling societal problems stand apart as their own breed. Other faculty members, it suggests, are pretty much mutts, according to its classification scheme.
The study, scheduled to be discussed this week at the American Educational Research Association’s annual conference, was conducted by John M. Braxton, a professor of education at Vanderbilt University, and Toby J. Park, a doctoral student in higher education there.
Their research follows up on influential analysis of different types of scholarly behavior that Ernest L. Boyer, who was then president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, published in his 1990 book, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Rejecting the prevailing view that the chief form of academic scholarship that mattered was “scholarship of discovery"—that is, the generation and testing of theory, and the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake—Mr. Boyer proposed that there were other forms of scholarship that colleges should value, such as the study of effective teaching methods.
Subsequent studies have sought to categorize faculty members by types of scholarly interest based on how the professors described themselves in surveys or interviews. The study by Mr. Braxton and Mr. Park, in contrast, treads new ground in examining whether faculty members fall into different groups based on their “latent” scholarly identities—that is, scholarly identities that the faculty members do not personally report having, but which are apparent from a close examination of their actions.
Different Strokes
For their analysis, Mr. Braxton and Mr. Park crunched data on more than 1,000 full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities gathered as part of the Faculty Professional Performance Survey administered by Mr. Braxton and two Vanderbilt doctoral students in 1999. That survey had asked the faculty members how often they engaged in each of nearly 70 distinct scholarly activities, such as experimenting with a new teaching method, publishing a critical book review in a journal, or being interviewed on a local television station. All of the faculty members examined in the new analysis were either tenured or tenure-track and fell into one of four academic disciplines: biology, chemistry, history, or sociology.
Using a research technique known as cluster analysis, Mr. Braxton and Mr. Park examined whether the faculty members fell into distinct groups based on their scholarly activities. They found that nearly two-thirds of those surveyed were involved in the full range of scholarly activity they examined.
Just over a third, however, stood out as focused almost solely on one of two types of scholarship: on teaching practices, or on using knowledge from their discipline to identify or solve societal problems.
The pedagogy-focused scholars were found mainly at liberal-arts colleges and, compared with the general population surveyed, tended to be younger, heavily represented in history departments, and more likely to be female and untenured. Those focused on problem-solving were located mainly at research and doctoral institutions, and were evenly dispersed across disciplines and more likely than others surveyed to be male and tenured.
The other three types of scholars identified by the study were “immersed scholars,” who focused on deriving and presenting new knowledge and tended to be heavily concentrated in biology or chemistry; “localized scholars,” who appeared to have a strong sense of duty to their local community and were most likely to be found in sociology departments; and “scholars of dissemination,” who focused heavily on spreading ideas and also were fairly well spread across disciplines. Each of those three types engaged in all of the broad types of scholarship studied.
In an interview Monday, Mr. Braxton said his research reaffirms that colleges need to keep in mind how scholars vary in terms of the activities in which they are strongest and have the most to contribute, and to structure their reward systems accordingly. Having faculty members who differ in terms of the activities they focus on “makes for a stronger basis for service to society,” he said.
Matching Chairs
One area in which faculty members from different disciplines do not show much variation is in their assessments of their department heads, according to a separate study scheduled to be presented at the conference on Saturday.
Moreover, the broad priorities expressed by academic department heads and how faculty members rate those priorities are fairly consistent across academic disciplines, suggesting that the priorities and experiences of people in such leadership positions “are more similar than divergent,” a paper summarizing the study’s findings says.
The study was conducted by B. Jan Middendorf, acting director of Kansas State University’s office of educational innovation and evaluation; Russell J. Webster, a doctoral student in psychology at Kansas State; and Steve Benton, a senior research officer at the IDEA Center, a nearby nonprofit research organization with the mission of helping colleges improve teaching, learning, and leadership. They based their analysis on the results of surveys administered to department heads and faculty members from 2003 to 2007 at 58 institutions that were IDEA Center clients. They examined the responses of 455 department heads and just over 7,500 faculty members who answered the surveys at some point during the period covered.
