The Tale of Two Degrees: The Need and Power of the Doctor of Arts

Ph.D. programs train students to perform quality research but not necessarily to deliver quality undergraduate instruction. For students who want to develop such skills, and for universities interested in creating programs to combine broad disciplinary instruction with specialization in effective pedagogical practices, there is a Ph.D. alternative—the Doctor of Arts (D.A.). The D.A. is regarded as a Ph.D. equivalent and aims to better train students to be effective educators since the majority of academic positions are located at primarily undergraduate institutions, with substantially more faculty time consumed by teaching duties than research. A significant difference between traditional Ph.D. and D.A. students is the latter engage in scholarship of teaching and learning, through both topical seminars and participation in supervised teaching internships. Thirty years of job placement statistics gathered from Idaho State University D.A. programs indicate that graduates are well qualified to enter into faculty positions at a wide range of higher education institutions.     

Curricular Integration as Innovation: Faculty Insights on Barriers to Institutionalizing Change

In the burgeoning literature on infusing undergraduate research and creative activities into the curriculum of research-intensive institutions, few studies have examined the perspectives of the faculty mentors who provide the individualized opportunities for students. Based on focus group data from 50 faculty mentors, we document faculty perceptions of the challenges to infusing undergraduate student scholarship across the curriculum. We conclude with practical suggestions for other institutions seeking to implement innovative change initiatives in general and to broaden opportunities for undergraduate research and creative activities in particular.     

Faculty Motivation to Mentor Students Through Undergraduate Research Programs: A Study of Enabling and Constraining Factors

Undergraduate research experiences are a “high impact” educational practice that confer benefits to students. However, little attention has been paid to understanding faculty motivation to mentor undergraduate students through research training programs, even as the number of programs has grown, requiring increasing numbers of faculty mentors. To address this, we introduce a conceptual model for understanding faculty motivation to mentor and test it by using empirical data to identify factors that enable and constrain faculty engagement in an undergraduate research program. Using cross-sectional survey data collected in 2013, we employed generalized linear modeling to analyze data from 536 faculty across 13 research institutions to examine how expected costs/benefits, dispositional factors, situational factors, previous experience, and demographic factors predicted faculty motivation to mentor. Results show that faculty who placed greater value on the opportunity to increase diversity in the academy through mentorship of underrepresented minorities were more likely to be interested in serving as mentors. Faculty who agreed more strongly that mentoring undergraduate students was time consuming and their institution’s reward structures were at odds with mentoring, or who had more constrained access to undergraduate students were less likely to be interested in serving as mentors. Mid-career faculty were more likely than late-career faculty to be interested in serving as mentors. Findings have implications for improving undergraduate research experiences, since the success of training programs hinges on engaging highly motivated faculty members as mentors.     

美国不同类型高校教师对本科教学的认知差异与成因分析

以加州州立大学这一教研型高校与加州大学这一研究型高校的教师代表为样本,通过质性访谈、编码分析发现美国不同类型高校的教师对本科教学地位、目标、认可与回报的认知存在明显差异。加州州立大学的教师视教学为“首要使命”,认为本科教育旨在促进学生的“个体发展”,教学为他们带来了多元成就;加州大学的教师则认为教学是基本职责之一,致力于训练“未来的研究者”,教学上的认可主要来自学生和同行。这种认知差异的直接原因在于各校在教师晋升中导向明确,组织使命得以内化为教师的个人目标。美国研究型大学同样注重在教学管理和人事制度上对教师的教学行为予以规范,保障本科教育质量。我国大学要重视本科教育,更应当提升教学在教师评价中的地位。     

Genome Consortium for Active Teaching: meeting the goals of BIO2010

The Genome Consortium for Active Teaching (GCAT) facilitates the use of modern genomics methods in undergraduate education. Initially focused on microarray technology, but with an eye toward diversification, GCAT is a community working to improve the education of tomorrow's life science professionals. GCAT participants have access to affordable microarrays, microarray scanners, free software for data analysis, and faculty workshops. Microarrays provided by GCAT have been used by 141 faculty on 134 campuses, including 21 faculty that serve large numbers of underrepresented minority students. An estimated 9480 undergraduates a year will have access to microarrays by 2009 as a direct result of GCAT faculty workshops. Gains for students include significantly improved comprehension of topics in functional genomics and increased interest in research. Faculty reported improved access to new technology and gains in understanding thanks to their involvement with GCAT. GCAT's network of supportive colleagues encourages faculty to explore genomics through student research and to learn a new and complex method with their undergraduates. GCAT is meeting important goals of BIO2010 by making research methods accessible to undergraduates, training faculty in genomics and bioinformatics, integrating mathematics into the biology curriculum, and increasing participation by underrepresented minority students.     

Partnered Research Experiences for Junior Faculty at Minority-Serving Institutions Enhance Professional Success

Scientific workforce diversity is critical to ensuring the realization of our national research goals and minority-serving institutions play a vital role in preparing undergraduate students for science careers. This paper summarizes the outcomes of supporting career training and research practices by faculty from teaching-intensive, minority-serving institutions. Support of these faculty members is predicted to lead to: 1) increases in the numbers of refereed publications, 2) increases in federal grant funding, and 3) a positive impact on professional activities and curricular practices at their home institutions that support student training. The results presented show increased productivity is evident as early as 1 yr following completion of the program, with participants being more independently productive than their matched peers in key areas that serve as measures of academic success. These outcomes are consistent with the goals of the Visiting Professorship Program to enhance scientific practices impacting undergraduate student training. Furthermore, the outcomes demonstrate the benefits of training support for research activities at minority-serving institutions that can lead to increased engagement of students from diverse backgrounds. The practices and results presented demonstrate a successful generalizable approach for stimulating junior faculty development and can serve as a basis for long-term faculty career development strategies that support scientific workforce diversity.     

Faculty and Students Conceptions of Assessment in Higher Education

Assessment in higher education serves multiple purposes such as providing information about student learning, student progress, teaching quality, and program and institutional accountability. Yet, little is known about faculty and students’ attitudes regarding different aspects of assessment that have wide-ranging implications for policy and practice in tertiary institutions. To investigate these views, parallel surveys of conceptions of assessment were administered to faculty and undergraduate students across four tertiary institutions including universities, an indigenous tertiary institution, and an institute of technology. A mean and covariance structures approach was used to test for measurement invariance and latent means differences between faculty and students regarding their conceptions of assessment. Results revealed differences in the latent means across the two groups. Faculty were likely to view assessment as a trustworthy process aiding teaching and learning, whereas students viewed assessment as focussed primarily on accountability and perceived assessment as irrelevant or even ignored in the teaching and learning process. These findings highlight the importance of ensuring that assessment policy and practices are fit for purposes, and are being carried out with integrity in ways that are transparent to and understood by both staff and students. While these results show how staff and students view assessment practices, one should keep in mind that while the sample was large and did incorporate different types of tertiary institutions, the inclusion of a broader range of disciplines would make the conclusions more generalizable.     

Engaging Undergraduates in Science Research: Not Just About Faculty Willingness

Despite the many benefits of involving undergraduates in research and the growing number of undergraduate research programs, few scholars have investigated the factors that affect faculty members’ decisions to involve undergraduates in their research projects. We investigated the individual factors and institutional contexts that predict faculty members’ likelihood of engaging undergraduates in their research project(s). Using data from the Higher Education Research Institute’s 2007–2008 Faculty Survey, we employ hierarchical generalized linear modeling to analyze data from 4,832 science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) faculty across 194 institutions to examine how organizational citizenship behavior theory and social exchange theory relate to mentoring students in research. Key findings show that faculty who work in the life sciences and those who receive government funding for their research are more likely to involve undergraduates in their research project(s). In addition, faculty at liberal arts or historically Black colleges are significantly more likely to involve undergraduate students in research. Implications for advancing undergraduate research opportunities are discussed.     

Undergraduate Student Participation in an Evaluation of a Police Program: A High-Impact Practice

High-impact educational practices are increasingly being recognized as powerful teaching strategies that can positively impact both student and faculty experiences in the classroom. Student persistence in college is correlated to campus integration, and one way this can be successfully facilitated is through student–faculty research partnerships. This paper documents the process of one faculty research team integrating four undergraduate students into an ongoing research project, for which students received course credit. There were many benefits of this collaboration to both student and faculty participants, but there were also many opportunities to better streamline the project and to potentially create an institutional template for replication of this process so that other faculty members can learn from this experience and more easily successfully integrate students into their own research.     

Investigation of chemistry graduate teaching assistants' teacher knowledge and teacher identity

Graduate students play an integral role in undergraduate chemistry education at doctoral granting institutions where they routinely serve as instructors of laboratories and supplementary discussion sessions. Simultaneously, graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) balance major research and academic responsibilities. Although GTAs have substantial instructional facetime with large numbers of undergraduate students, little is known about their conceptions of teaching or their identities as teachers. To investigate the knowledge that GTAs have regarding teaching in this unique context, their teaching identities, and how these developed, we conducted 22 interviews with graduate students from several universities at various levels in their graduate school career using a modified Teacher Beliefs Interview. Interviews were analyzed for two overarching teacher learning constructs: teacher knowledge and teacher identity. We characterized chemistry GTAs' teacher knowledge and identity and determined major influencing factors. We found that chemistry GTAs often identified as a tutor or lab manager, which hindered their self-investment in developing as teachers. The results presented herein contribute to an understanding of GTAs' teacher knowledge, teacher identity, and their teaching context, from which training can be designed to best support GTA development.     

Faculty Engagement in Mentoring Undergraduate Students: How Institutional Environments Regulate and Promote Extra-Role Behavior

Faculty-student interaction is critical for quality undergraduate education. Faculty mentorship provides concrete benefits for students, faculty members, and institutions. However, little is known about the effect of institutional context on mentorship. Using data from interviews of 98 faculty at five different California State University institutions, we examined faculty motivations and institutional supports and barriers to mentoring as it occurs outside of formalized programs. We argue that this type of mentoring is distinct from advising and teaching and constitutes extra-role behavior. Further, institutional norms and the culture of the academic profession often hinder mentorship. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.     

FACULTY GENDER EFFECTS ON ACADEMIC RESEARCH AND TEACHING

This paper estimates the effects of facultygender differences on research and teachingproductivities, using a sample of 523 four-year-plusinstitutions of higher education for the academic year1987-88. Female and male faculty inputs along with anadministrative staff input are used to estimate threejoint-product production functions for three outputsfrom undergraduate teaching, graduate teaching, and research. The main research results show thatfemale faculty have significant marginal productivity inresearch at liberal arts institutions but not atinstitutions in other Carnegie categories. Oneexplanation for this finding is the limitations withrespect to employment and discipline patterns of usingresearch expenditures to measure research output. Theresults are compared to earlier findings based onindividual faculty survey responses.     

Merit matters: Student perceptions of faculty quality and reward

This empirical research explores a role that the quality of teaching and students’ competence play in shaping students’ views about the upward mobility opportunities in their higher education institutions. It is often understood that the principal role of higher education is to promote merit-based mobility amongst students, as well as espouse the merit-based upward mobility amongst its faculty. How exactly students in higher education form their views about the presence of meritorious upward mobility is the question that remains largely unanswered, especially in developing societies. To help answer this question, the study relies on the binary logistic regression of data collected via 762 surveys from 6 public higher education institutions in Bosnia and Herzegovina and determines what factors help predict students’ views on whether faculty promotions are merited or not. Findings in this article are sub-selected from a broader empirical work, and they point to a novel link: the quality of teaching and students’ views on whether the most competent students are first to graduate in their faculties are the key predictors of whether students believe the faculty members within their higher education institutions are promoted based on merit. In the absence of meritocracy, students are, as this research finds, likely to categorize the educational system as corrupt. When the merit-based competition does not determine who moves up within higher education, one's belonging to the political, social, and economic elites tends to become the alternative basis for the upward mobility. Moving away from the merit-based mobility can have broad social consequences particularly in developing countries that are poorly equipped to react to such digressions, underlining the relevance of this work cross-nationally.     

A model for using a concept inventory as a tool for students' assessment and faculty professional development

This essay describes how the use of a concept inventory has enhanced professional development and curriculum reform efforts of a faculty teaching community. The Host Pathogen Interactions (HPI) teaching team is composed of research and teaching faculty with expertise in HPI who share the goal of improving the learning experience of students in nine linked undergraduate microbiology courses. To support evidence-based curriculum reform, we administered our HPI Concept Inventory as a pre- and postsurvey to approximately 400 students each year since 2006. The resulting data include student scores as well as their open-ended explanations for distractor choices. The data have enabled us to address curriculum reform goals of 1) reconciling student learning with our expectations, 2) correlating student learning with background variables, 3) understanding student learning across institutions, 4) measuring the effect of teaching techniques on student learning, and 5) demonstrating how our courses collectively form a learning progression. The analysis of the concept inventory data has anchored and deepened the team's discussions of student learning. Reading and discussing students' responses revealed the gap between our understanding and the students' understanding. We provide evidence to support the concept inventory as a tool for assessing student understanding of HPI concepts and faculty development.     

What characterizes a productive research department?

The correlates of average departmental annual research journal publication rates of faculty were examined in three disciplines: chemistry, history, and psychology. Variables studied included factual information about each department, faculty perceptions and ratings, and graduate students' perceptions and ratings. Content included academic programs, specific policies and practices, characteristics of students, faculty, facilities, etc., as well as the quality of teaching and human relations in the departments. Although the common results indicated the importance of able faculty and students, a strong emphasis on research and the provision of time and funds for faculty to pursue research, there were discipline-specific patterns of results. In chemistry the pattern of productive departments suggested large research laboratories, in history a scholarly apprenticeship approach, and in psychology an emphasis on research over practice. Discipline specific studies may be the best approach to understanding research productivity.     

A new paradigm for mentored undergraduate research in molecular microbiology

Science educators agree that an undergraduate research experience is critical for students who are considering graduate school or research careers. The process of researching a topic in the primary literature, designing experiments, implementing those experiments, and analyzing the results is essential in developing the analytical skills necessary to become a true scientist. Because training undergraduates who will only be in the laboratory for a short period is time consuming for faculty mentors, many students are unable to find appropriate research opportunities. We hypothesized that we could effectively mentor several students simultaneously, using a method that is a hybrid of traditional undergraduate research and a traditional laboratory course. This article describes a paradigm for mentored undergraduate research in molecular microbiology where students have ownership of their individual projects, but the projects are done in parallel, enabling the faculty mentor to guide multiple students efficiently.     

Role of the Undergraduate Student Research Assistant in the New Millennium

In this study, we analyze the contribution of the undergraduate student who participates in the process of generating scientific data and developing a research project using Brazilian research as an example. Historically, undergraduate students have performed the critical role of research assistants in developing countries. This aspect has been underappreciated as a means of generating scientific data in Brazilian research facilities. Brazilian educational institutions are facing major age-related generational changes among the science faculty within the next 5–10 yr. A lack of adequate support for graduate students leads to a concern that undergraduates will not be interested in choosing research assistant programs and, subsequently, academic research careers. To remedy this situation it is important to focus on ways to encourage new research careers and enhance university–industry collaborations.     

The Influences of Faculty on Undergraduate Student Participation in Research and Creative Activities

Using data collected from surveys of college juniors and seniors and faculty members in related academic departments, this study examined whether faculty teaching and research orientations, as well as faculty external funding, had any impact on undergraduate student participation in research and creative activities. The results of the study indicated that faculty research orientation and external funding were indeed positively related to student participation in research activities. However, faculty members’ teaching orientation was not significant. Further analyses indicated that faculty teaching and research orientations had different impacts on a range of research and creative activities by undergraduate students. The findings from this study provide insight on ways of improving college teaching and learning as well as informing the development of institutional academic policies related to faculty and undergraduate education. Shouping Hu is Associate Professor of Higher Education at Florida State University. He received his M.S. degree in Economics and Ph.D. in Higher Education from Indiana University. His research and scholarship focus on college access and success, student engagement, and higher education policy. Kathyrine Scheuch is the Deputy Director of Research and Evaluation in the Division of Community Colleges, Florida Department of Education. She received her Ed.D. in Higher Education from Florida State University. Her research interests include undergraduate research activities and minority student issues. Joy Gaston Gayles is Associate Professor of Higher Education at North Carolina State University. She received her Ph.D. in Higher Education from Ohio State University. Her research interests include the college student experience and its impact on student development and learning.     

Educating Young Educators: A Pedagogical Internship for Undergraduate Teaching Assistants

Although undergraduates have long held a role as teaching assistants for introductory science courses at liberal arts colleges and universities, educational institutions often do not provide these students with opportunities to explore science teaching and pedagogy. At Brandeis University, we designed an internship course to help increase the motivation, understanding, and knowledge of teaching pedagogy for undergraduate teaching assistants that is offered concurrently with their teaching responsibilities. Weekly sessions with faculty mentors are guided by readings in current science education literature, and throughout the semester students are asked to develop new course material based on the pedagogical frameworks discussed. To evaluate the effectiveness of this course, we surveyed students at the close of the semester. We found an overall increase in student confidence levels with regard to teaching and better awareness of the difficulties faced in science education. All students who participated in the course expressed interest in participating in future educational internships. We believe that the Educating Young Educators internship has the potential to be a catalyst for personal and professional growth from a novice into an informed young educator.