Let past research and data speak.

Educational research does not confirm the purported linkage between teaching and academic research

Reviewing studies done before 1965, Brown and Mayhew(2) concluded that "Whenever studies of teaching effectiveness are made as judged by students, no relationship is found between judged teaching effectiveness and research productivity." Finkelstein(3) and Feldman(4) reviewed more recent research studies and found that the correlation between good teaching and strong research was either nonexistent or, in a minority of cases, slightly positive. Interestingly, quality of publications (as assessed by frequency of citation) was considerably more likely than any other publication measure to correlate negatively with teaching effectiveness, and individual authorship of books and first authorship of articles also showed strong negative correlations. The implication is that professors doing individual research good enough to gain widespread peer recognition are least likely to be judged effective as teachers.

Perhaps the most telling indication of the nature of the research-teaching interaction is provided by Alexander Astin (5) in a landmark study conducted in the late 1980's. Astin accumulated data on faculty members and almost 25,000 students at 309 institutions of higher education. For each institution, he assessed the faculty's research orientation (as measured by research publications, research funding, time spent away from campus on research-related activities, and self-rated importance of engaging in research and being recognized for research achievement) and student orientation (level of interest in students' academic and personal problems, sensitivity to minority issues, accessibility outside office hours, opportunities for student-faculty interaction), correlating each orientation with a variety of measures of student performance and attitudes.

The results are striking. Research orientation of the faculty correlates negatively with completion of the bachelor's degree, various other measures of academic performance, and student satisfaction with quality of instruction and the overall college experience (p. 338). Student orientation of the faculty correlates positively with bachelor's degree completion, overall academic attainment, student satisfaction with quality of instruction, and self-reported growth in preparation for graduate school, writing skills, leadership abilities, general knowledge, and public speaking skills (pp. 341-342). Research orientation and student orientation are negatively correlated (p. 338).

The quantitative results of the study led Astin to reject the assertion that research and teaching are mutually supportive. On the contrary, he concludes that "In certain respects, the two poles of this factor [research vs. student orientation] reinforce the commonly held notion that, in American higher education, there is a fundamental conflict between research and teaching" (p. 67) and that "Attending a college whose faculty is heavily Research-Oriented increases student dissatisfaction and impacts negatively on most measures of cognitive and affective development. Attending a college that is strongly oriented toward student development shows the opposite pattern of effects (p. 363)."

Certainly there are professors who are both good researchers and good teachers, but their presence on faculties (and hence the occasional slight positive correlation between research and teaching performance) proves nothing, since they are likely to get promotion and tenure where professors who are excellent teachers and fair or poor researchers are not. The real question is whether an institutional emphasis on research activity improves or detracts from teaching quality. The evidence clearly points to the latter.

 

FORCING ALL PROFESSORS TO BE RESEARCHERS HURTS TEACHING QUALITY

Does any professor always do an optimal job of teaching - continually updating and improving lecture notes, providing concrete demonstrations of abstract concepts, making up fresh assignments and tests that cover the full range of thinking skills and problem-solving abilities? Probably not - no more than any professor always replicates all data points and reads all references he or she cites in research papers. There are simply not enough hours in the day to do everything as thoroughly as it should be done, and so shortcuts and compromises are necessary and inevitable in academic life. Given this necessity, the question becomes which activity to compromise.

Here the academic system stacks the deck. Professors at research universities who choose to emphasize teaching are likely to experience second-class citizenship and denial of tenure and promotion. To move up the academic ladder they must dedicate themselves primarily to research, doing what it takes to meet minimal local teaching standards and no more. And since the system uses the same performance criteria for every new faculty member, the students experience a continuing succession of instructors who have either voluntarily or reluctantly chosen to do a poorer job of teaching than they are capable of doing.

The low position of teaching on the academic scale of values manifests in several ways:

Few of us routinely take the time and put in the effort required to teach as well as we could. It doesn't take much effort to copy derivations from notes onto a chalkboard, or to assign problems from the text as homework and photocopy and post the solutions from the instructor's manual, or to throw a test together a day or an hour before giving it without working out the solutions. It's even easier to recycle the same notes, homework problems, and tests every time the course is subsequently given. The material may be outdated, the lectures mechanical, the tests familiar to the students, but at least the cost in professorial time and energy is minimal.

Our instructional environment is less and less conducive to learning. As institutions place increased emphasis on research, more teaching is done in large lecture classes or by graduate students and adjunct faculty members, more grading is done and corrective feedback given by teaching assistants, and more advising is done perfunctorily or by non-faculty members (5, p. 419).

We have largely abandoned our responsibility to be mentors and role models to our students. Just as it is hard work to prepare good lecture notes, homework assignments, and tests, it takes considerable effort for professors to memorize the names of all the students in their classes and take time to listen to students' problems when they have no time to attend to their own. Studies have shown that students with even one teacher who does such things are much more likely to succeed than students who never have one. Where are those teachers supposed to come from?

We are not functioning as professional teachers in the way that we function as professional researchers. Most engineering professors do not read education journals, attend education conferences, or belong to the ASEE. They do not develop innovative teaching methods themselves or try proven methods developed by others (e.g. cooperative learning, open-ended questioning, in-class brainstorming and trouble-shooting exercises). They especially do not write undergraduate textbooks. Why should they? The system offers few incentives to do these things and imposes severe penalties if taking the time to do them cuts down on research output.

We do not practice what we teach. We are supposedly training people to design and construct manufacturing processes and process equipment, devise and implement control algorithms, supervise startups, identify and overcome product quality problems, and assess environmental impacts of proposed processes. Unfortunately, the number of us who have ever done any of these things is small and shrinking. Since we are most comfortable teaching what we know best, we teach less engineering practice and more of the engineering science we know from our own graduate study and research. In the words of Reuel Shinnar, "We have become the only profession taught by nonpractitioners."

 

...AND ALSO HURTS RESEARCH QUALITY

Research - like most human undertakings - is performed best when it is motivated by a strong sense of mission, if it is "the passionate pursuit of a problem or vision that obsesses the researcher and will not let him/her rest."(6) Professors who work on a research problem not out of a passion to know and understand but simply to move up the academic ladder - or worse, to raise funds - are unlikely to produce worthwhile research. Rather, their goal will be to produce results in quantity and haste, publishing lots of papers that can serve as the bases of more proposals to raise additional funds to support more research. They will accept superficial explanations of results without critical scrutiny, ignoring contradictions or casually dismissing them as "outliers" or "anomalies."

A glance through any research-oriented engineering journal - at the complex mathematical models that will never apply to real systems, and the experimental data that will never be needed or could easily be obtained if the need ever arose - suggests that this situation has already come to dominate academic research. According to a recent study, 72% of the papers appearing in leading engineering journals were never cited(7). Imagine the educational uses that could have been made of the money and time spent on the research described in those papers.