Research productivity and perceived teaching effectiveness: A survey of economics faculty

The relationship between research productivity and teaching effectiveness has long been a controversial topic among university professors. This study utilizes a nationwide survey of economics faculty to examine the relationship between research productivity and classroom performance, using self-reported measures of research output and teaching evaluation scores, and to solicit the participants' opinions on this issue. Findings indicate a very weak relationship between research output and teaching effectiveness. However, individual and institutional characteristics seem to explain some differences in research output and teaching evaluation scores. Further, faculty opinions on the research-teaching relationship seem to be influenced by institutional and individual characteristics.     

Factors explaining faculty technology use and productivity

This study examines factors related to technology use in teaching by university faculty. An EFA analysis of multiple questions of technology use in the classroom found two factors: one loaded with Web use and the second with email use. Therefore, three research questions were asked: What factors explain faculty use of the Web or email? Are these factors the same for both Web and email use? What is the relationship of technology use to faculty productivity? The sample included full-time faculty at doctoral and research institutions selected from the National Study of Postsecondary Faculty:1999 (NSOPF:99) dataset. Independent variables included measures of teaching, research, and service productivity, along with other contextual, demographic, and professional variables. Hierarchical regression analysis was used to prepare eight models (email and Web use for Doctoral I, Doctoral II, Research I, and Research II institutions). Results confirmed that age and Internet access were important factors related to faculty technology use. The relationship between email and Web use to teaching productivity in particular is intriguing and may indicate that productive faculty use technology to help them be more productive or that technology use impacts productivity. Research and service productivity also exhibited distinctive patterns with email and Web use.     

Correlates of faculty publication productivity: A cross-national analysis

This study is a cross-national empirical analysis ofthe correlates of faculty publication productivity ina ten-country sample. The countries included in thestudy are as follows: Australia, Brazil, Chile, HongKong, Israel, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the UnitedKingdom, and the United States. Publicationproductivity was measured as number of articlespublished over a three-year period. By reviewing thefindings of related literature on the professoriate inthe developed world, the study seeks to determine theextent to which these hold for less developed academicsystems as well, and more broadly, to identifysimilarities and differences in the patterns ofpublication productivity across the examined nations.The statistical analyses conducted for each countryreveal differences that clearly challenge theunqualified application of established researchproductivity models to other national contexts.     

Writing method and productivity of science and engineering faculty

The present study aimed to describe the methods of writing used by university faculty and to explore relationships between method and productivity in writing. The survey reported here examined the cognitive strategies, tools, work scheduling, environment, and rituals used by 121 science and engineering faculty members in writing technical documents such as journal articles. The most commonly reported methods (e.g., the cognitive strategy of mentally planning large units of text structure and selecting a pen or pencil for a tool) were uncorrelated with reported productivity. Selecting a quiet work environment was the only typical habit that was associated with high productivity. Three other aspects of writing method were also related to high productivity, but they were not widely employed. These were using a dictation machine, preparing detailed written outlines before beginning a first draft, and the ritual of exercising vigorously before or during a writing session.     

Institutional and technical constraints on faculty gross productivity in American doctoral universities

Scholars disagree about the manner and extent of environmental structuring of university activities. This study supports arguments that the environment highly structures the relationships between faculty and the academic products of undergraduate instruction, graduate instruction, and research. Multiple correlation coefficients exceeded 90 percent for regressions of faculty size on counts of undergraduate and graduate enrollments and published articles for all universities classified as Research I or II or Doctoral I or II, demonstrating how constrained is doctoral faculty gross productivity in doctoral universities in the United States. Possible institutional and technical constraints are discussed. The regressions reveal economies of scale and economies of scope for some mixes of faculty academic activities, but not for others. Implications on productivity are explored for university type, control, and science emphasis. A typology for productivity studies is also outlined.     

Faculty accountability and faculty workload: A preliminary cost analysis of their relationship as revealed by PhD productivity

General concerns for faculty accountability are examined in the context of faculty workload and costs. Graduating a PhD student is used as the unit for analysis. The unit is compared to instructional productivity. The data came from a 10-year interval at a major graduate university. Six liberal arts departments with a 225-member faculty provide the PhD output and workload information. Work equivalents are determined from institutional and faculty self-reports. Graduating a PhD is found to be equivalent to one-third of a full workload. Implications are given for comparisons between programs within a university and between types of institutions in the larger system of higher education. Concerns also emerge for improved personnel practices with respect to faculty work assignments.     

Market conditions,productivity, and promotion among university faculty

This paper contrasts the performance levels and promotion experiences of 371 faculty members under three different market conditions reflecting the supply and demand for university faculty (buyer's market, seller's market, and stable market). The central questions examined are, What is the effect of market conditions upon (1) the length of time it takes for promotion; (2) the promotion rate; (3) the productivity of assistant and associate professors before each promotion; and (4) the productivity of full professors after attaining that rank? Findings are most consistent with a market model indicating that faculty promoted during a buyer's market remain in rank longer before being promoted and exhibit a greater rate of productivity than faculty promoted during other market conditions. There is also support for the elite model in that the impact of “tight” market conditions on productivity is greatest for faculty below the rank of full professor.     

Sex-related differences on a task of volume and density

A sex-related difference, favoring boys, was found on initial performance of two samples (one British, one American) of 10- and 11-year-old children on a task of volume and density. After a period of classroom instruction that included opportunities for children to interact with appropriate materials and each other, both boys and girls performed at a higher level on the task, but the difference between them remained the same. There was no indication of a sex-related difference other than a time lag, in pattern of development of the concept. The question of why there is a sex-related difference, which persists in spite of experience and instruction, is discussed.     

An analysis of the scholarly productivity of instructional technology faculty

The resumés of 132 instructional technology (IT) faculty were analyzed in an effort to assess the scholarly productivity of IT faculty. Faculty were surveyed to identify leading basic and applied IT journals and to determine overall publication patterns. The findings indicate that individuals who are now full professors have a higher publication rate than faculty at lower ranks in instructional systems/educational technology programs. On an annual basis, individuals in educational psychology programs published more applied, basic, and overall research than faculty in other academic affiliations.     

Sex differences in the environments of graduate students and faculty

This paper considers some important psychological aspects of the academic experience for male and female graduate faculty members and students. Drawing on data collected in a recent national study of doctoral program quality, information pertaining to the graduate department's environment for learning, the extent of faculty members' concern for students, graduate student assistantship experiences, and faculty members' satisfactions and views about various departmental practices and policies are examined. Gender differences in both student and faculty member perceptions of their environments were found to be generally slight and to vary by discipline.     

A time allocation study of university faculty

Many previous time allocation studies treat work as a single activity and examine trade-offs between work and other activities. This paper investigates the at-work allocation of time among teaching, research, grant writing and service by science and engineering faculty at top US research universities. We focus on the relationship between tenure (and promotion) and time allocation, and we find that tenure and promotion do affect the allocation of time. The specific trade-offs are related to particular career paths. For example, full professors spend increasing time on service at the expense of teaching and research while longer-term associate professors who have not been promoted to full professor spend significantly more time teaching at the expense of research time. Finally, our results suggest that women, on average, allocate more hours to university service and less time to research than do men.     

Study of factors influencing research productivity of agriculture faculty members in Iran

The purpose of this research is to analyze the relationship between individual, institutional and demographic characteristics on one hand and the research productivity of agriculture faculty members on the other. The statistical population of the research comprises 280 academic staff in agricultural faculties all over Tehran Province. The data regarding research productivity and demographic characteristics were extracted from the faculty members’ profiles. Questionnaires were utilized to collect information concerning individual and institutional variables. The reliably of the questionnaire was calculated to be between 0.74 and 0.97 using the Cronbach’s Alpha. The regression analysis revealed that from among demographic characteristics two variables, namely, academic rank and age ( \textR_\textAD ² {\text{R}}_{\text{AD}}^{ 2}  = 0.265), among individual characteristics, three variables, namely, working habits, creativity as well as autonomy and commitment ( \textR_\textAD ² {\text{R}}_{\text{AD}}^{ 2}  = 0.097), and among institutional characteristics four variables namely, network of communication with colleagues, resources of facilities, corporate management and clear research objectives ( \textR_\textAD ² {\text{R}}_{\text{AD}}^{ 2}  = 0.151) were significant predictors for agricultural faculty members’ research productivity.     

Optimal allocation of faculty time under uncertainty in production

A model of expected utility maximization is used to study the optimal allocation of a professor's time between research and teaching in a situation where both production activities are subject to uncertainty. It was shown that, in general, a professor's optimal allocation of time under uncertain production departs from the certainty strategy. An explicit model was developed to evaluate the effects of time effort in research and teaching with respect to changes in the degree of uncertainty, the Pratt-Arrow index of risk aversion, and the unit output rewards of research and teaching (for example, “merit pay”).     

Age-related differences on cognitive overload in an audio-visual memory task

The present study aimed to provide evidence outlining whether the type of stimuli used in teaching would provoke differing levels of recall across three different academic age groups. One hundred and twenty-one participants, aged 11–25 years, were given a language-based memory task in the form of a wordlist consisting of 15 concrete and 15 abstract words, presented either visually, acoustically, or a combination of both audio and visual presentation. The study found that the presence of cognitive overload was greater in the older academic age participants than in the younger groups and that as academic experience increased, the visual presentation of the target stimuli produced greater levels of recall than was the case with acoustic and audio-visual presentation. Overall the findings indicate that cognitive overload increases with age, as the younger-age groups were found to have significantly higher levels of word recall in the audio-visual condition than the older groups.     

Foreign-born women faculty work roles and productivity at research universities in the United States

Using the data from the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF:04) survey, the study examined foreign-born women faculty members’ work roles and productivity in the areas of teaching, research, and service in comparison with their US-born counterparts at research universities in the US. The findings provided some evidence to suggest that foreign-born women faculty members’ patterns of engagement in work activities contradicted the gendered division of labor in academia. The findings indicated that foreign-born female academics were significantly more engaged in research that was evident in the number of scholarly outputs they produced compared to US-born women faculty colleagues. On the other hand, they seemed to be less involved in teaching and service functions of their work than their US-born women peers. The study could serve as a good starting point to further examine foreign-born women faculty socialization into faculty roles and their academic work culture.     

Individual differences in relative metacomprehension accuracy: variation within and across task manipulations

In recent decades, increasing numbers of studies have focused on metacomprehension accuracy, or readers’ ability to distinguish between texts comprehended more vs. less well. Following early findings that suggested readers are fairly poor at doing so, a number of studies have identified specific tasks to supplement a single reading of text that have resulted in greater metacomprehension accuracy. One assumption underlying these studies is that, in the absence of such tasks, metacomprehension accuracy is uniformly poor, and given their implementation, readers uniformly improve. Here we describe the individual variation that occurs both in the absence (e.g., within a single text reading manipulation) and presence (e.g., within a rereading or selective rereading task manipulation) of these supplementary tasks (N = 214), in order to make a case for greater attention to individual differences in metacomprehension accuracy. We also introduce a new manipulation in metacomprehension research, selective rereading, and argue that certain types of tasks may be more likely to reveal individual differences in metacomprehension accuracy due to the nature of the task being more or less demanding on working memory capacity.