Teaching, Research and Scholarship Part 1

My recent post highlighting Derek Bok’s Higher Education in America focused on the undergraduate curriculum and teaching. Today’s post will be the first in a series that examines the links between teaching and research, and the role that scholarship plays in tertiary education. My motivation to delve into some of the literature was motivated by Bok’s survey of the current state of affairs (in his chapter 15, “Publish or Perish”). The chapter opens by describing the growing mound of research publications, the vast majority being “unloved and unread” and the difficulty of keeping up. A professor is quoted describing all this activity as “busywork on a vast, almost incomprehensible scale”.

Bok then pivots to the question of whether the growing emphasis on this sort of research productivity “is a diversion of faculty time from teaching”. He then outlines the stereotypical response from both camps. Those that claim research positively correlates with teaching argue that research-active faculty are likely to “exhibit to their students the special enthusiasm and excitement that come from active engagement in the quest for discovery at the frontiers of knowledge.” Furthermore it “offers the best possible evidence of a young faculty member’s quality of mind and thus helps an institution make sounder appointments and promotion decisions”. The naysayers argue that the specialized arcana of academia is unlikely to lead to better teaching of a broader undergraduate curriculum, that students receive less attention, and that teaching is “sacrificed” for work with dubious beneficial value. With an election cycle coming around in the U.S., every month brings a new round of political pandering with clarion calls to “reform" higher education.

In examining the evidence, Bok cites Feldman’s 1987 comprehensive meta-analysis that finds little correlation between research productivity and teaching effectiveness. I’ve read the larger oft-cited follow-up study by Hattie and Marsh in 1996 that comes to similar conclusions. I’ll write more extensively on this in a subsequent post, but here’s a quick summary of the findings. Time spent on research does lead to research productivity gains, but there is no correlation that time spent on teaching led to more effective teaching. There was overall close to zero correlation between teaching and research “ability” (even with different measures). Interestingly, the social sciences showed a very slight although barely significant statistical positive correlation while the humanities and natural sciences showed none. There is a slight positive correlation in four-year liberal arts colleges but not in other types of institutions. There is however a slight negative correlation in the more recent studies compared to the older studies – perhaps indicating a tipping point where the publish-or-perish research ratrace is indeed negatively impacting teaching. Certainly the requirements for research in tenure and promotion has risen significantly over the last forty years.

Interestingly, surveys from 1972-1992 indicate that while time spent on research increased, there was not much change to time spent on teaching. The number of hours worked per week went up, and the summer months were increasingly occupied with research (faculty members are on a 9-month contract in the U.S.). The 1992-2012 surveys indicate that time spent on teaching did decrease although this was primarily due to lower teaching loads. Bok speculates that the effect of increased research demands in the summer has likely led to a reduction in the revision of old courses and improving pedagogy – thereby leading possibly to a decrease in the quality of education received by students. The reduced hours spent by students on academic work over the last forty years has exacerbated matters. In addition “work-life stress has also intensified over the past twenty years, most noticeably from research and publishing demands, but also because of additional time devoted to committee work and coping with institutional procedures and red tape.” Having experience as a “middle-manager” (no power but all of the responsibility), I can attest that the bureaucracy and red tape has gotten far worse over the last several years. I suspect at least part of it is indeed due to the “rise of the administration”.

There is another potentially pernicious effect of publish-or-perish on the undergraduate curriculum and course offerings. Given that all faculty members today now go through extensive research-focused Ph.D. programs, “most faculty members prefer to teach the kinds of specialized courses and seminars that are closely aligned with their scholarly interests. Not surprisingly, teaching what professors know best does not always coincide with what undergraduates need to learn.” Since I am one of those professors who “enjoys giving introductory courses to freshmen and sophomores”, I’m thankful to be in a department where I am not in the minority. (We value both teaching and research!) But perhaps that’s because we have no graduate program so all our focus is on undergraduate education. On the other hand many (although not all) of my colleagues in R1 institutions more often than not fit Bok’s description. These intro-level classes are burgeoning and often “relegated” to lecturers and part-time adjunct faculty.

Bok concludes: “The result is a curriculum designed to suit the interests and intellectual strengths of a faculty organized and trained in accordance with established fields of specialized inquiry… [The curricular requirements] are hard to change in any fundamental way, especially in research-oriented colleges and universities where faculties are most powerful and the emphasis on the advancement of specialized knowledge most pronounced.” Given the increased work stress and hours, “faculty members who feel such pressure will presumably tend to be less enthusiastic about suggestions that they master a new technology for classroom use, attend [workshops] on innovations in pedagogy, or reorganize their courses and instructional methods to introduce more active learning.”

Given Bok’s summary of affairs, it sounds as if the increased publish-or-perish state of affairs could be negatively impacting undergraduate education. Although the Hattie and Marsh study showed close to zero correlation, that work was twenty years ago, and mostly used empirical measures such as student ratings on teaching evaluations and a variety of survey (self and peer rating) information that may or may not be a good proxy for teaching quality. As a scientist who engages in research and who loves teaching, I’d like to think there is a clear positive link between the two, but this has not been demonstrated empirically. However, there may be other ways to frame the question. In subsequent posts, I’m planning on investigating Boyer’s (1990) broadening of research categories in the way scholarship is defined, the details of the Hattie & Marsh study, work being done in different countries on this topic (studies suggest there is much context-dependence), and explore potential high-impact practices (that have an empirical basis) possibly re-envisioning what many have called the research-teaching nexus.