Four weeks ago, a Brookings report caught my eye while I was
websurfing. “Are great teachers poor scholars?” by David Figlio and Morton
Schapiro focuses this question on their own campus, Northwestern University.
Here’s a link to the report. Since the release of the report coincided with my
early semester busyness, I didn’t get around to blogging about it. So a month
later, here are a summary of the results and my subsequent thoughts.
The authors used two proxies to measure teaching quality:
(1) The percentage of students that declared a major in an area after taking a
first-quarter course in that same field is the “conversion” rate. The authors
refer to this an indicator of inspiration
due to the first-quarter instructor. (2) The effect of students’ future grades
in subsequent classes in the same major field reflects the longer-term value
provided by the first-quarter instructor. The authors refer to this as an
indicator of deep learning. The data
was crunched for eight cohorts of first-year undergraduates.
Research was measured in two ways: (1) Northwestern annually
recognizes and honors a subset of its faculty for “research excellence”.
Criteria include being elected into prestigious academic organizations,
receiving prestigious fellowships, winning major research awards, and more. (2)
The h-index was computed for faculty members scaled to departments since there
is a large variation in citation norms across different disciplines.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the two research measures
correlated. On the other hand, there is essentially no correlation between the
two teaching measures, i.e., an instructor who had inspired many students choose to major in that field may or may not
have provided them with deep learning.
And those who seem to have provided deeper
learning, may or may not show much in the way of inspiration. Without more details and the raw data, the lack of
correlation is unclear. Furthermore, whether the teaching proxies are
reasonable indicators of inspiration,
deep learning, or even teaching
effectiveness is questionable. The authors do suggest the possibility that
their proxies are ineffective measures, but clearly they think there is
something to their results, otherwise it likely would not have been published.
Are these results unique to Northwestern? The participants
are only tenured faculty, thereby narrowing the pool to those who are at least
successful enough on both fronts to earn tenure. As an R1 institution, the
teaching loads at Northwestern are also lower on average. With a heavier
teaching load, the time constraints may start to impact quality. If you’re at a
liberal arts college, with no graduate students, the time factor is even more
acute. You don’t have teaching assistants to help with the grading, although
this is balanced by having smaller sections. If you’re a lab scientist, your
group’s productivity isn’t going to be as high unless you as the principal
investigator put in a substantial amount of time training and working with your
undergraduate research students. This is balanced by lower productivity
research requirements compared to R1 institutions, at least in terms of
quantity, not quality.
The report questions the motivation of the University of
California system’s move to security-of-employment lecturers, effectively a
tenure-line teaching track. The authors think that “protecting the time of the
research faculty” may not be an adequate argument. Perhaps Northwestern has
more resources, but from a resource point of view, especially with burgeoning
numbers of students flocking to the sciences (at least at the introductory
level), adjunctification of faculty is simply going to increase. Providing
security-of-employment and retaining top-notch teachers who choose to devote
their career to full-time teaching excellence seems to me a good thing.
The authors state that “the reason why most of the top-rated
universities in the world are located in the United States is not what goes on
in its classrooms; it is the research power of its faculties.” And furthermore,
“faculty salaries at research universities are determined primarily by research
performance and the reputation that comes with it.” I appreciate the fact that
having a diversity of educational institutions in the United States allows
serving a diverse population with diverse needs. I chose being at a liberal
arts college because while I think research and advancing knowledge for its own
sake it is important, research is an excellent activity contributing to the education
of college undergraduates. But productivity isn’t the main goal, education is!
I think it sad that the marketplace places the R1 star researcher at the top of
an academic hierarchy, often allowing such people to negotiate lower teaching
loads or avoid introductory undergraduate courses. Not all institutions do
these, and perhaps Northwestern falls into that category, but as competition
continues to heat up, human beings have only 24 hours per day, some of which
needs to be spent sleeping or recuperating. It’s hard to achieve excellence in
multiple areas without putting in the time and having the appropriate
supporting resources. Something will have to give.
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