Involvement in Learning revisited: Lessons we have learned

Journal of College Student Development, Sep/Oct 1999 by Astin, Alexander W

Teaching versus Research

What Matters in College? also provides strong support for what we have come to call the "student affairs point of view." Among the many environmental variables used in this study we identified two measures of the institutional climate that have powerful but contrasting effects on student development: the research orientation of the faculty and the student orientation of the faculty. Research orientation is defined in both behavioral and attitudinal terms: the publication rate of the faculty, the amount of time they spend conducting research, and their stated personal commitment to research. A faculty with a strong research orientation would thus publish many articles and books, spend a substantial amount of their working time on research, and attach a high personal priority to engaging in research. It is informative to see what other characteristics correlate with research orientation. For example, its correlation with the average faculty salary at the institution is an astounding .86. What this tells us, among other things, is that the primary factor that accounts for differences in what institutions pay their faculties is the faculty's degree of engagement in research. Research orientation also correlates highly (r = .67) with the institution's "Resources and Reputational Emphasis," which is another institutional "climate" measure reflecting the extent to which the institution is perceived as placing a high emphasis on the acquisition of resources and the enhancement of the institution's national image and reputation. For several years now I have been arguing that too many institutions define their "excellence" in terms of either (a) their level of resources or (b) their national reputation as reflected in various polls and surveys (Astin, 1985). Given that faculty research "stars" are considered to be one of the prime institutional "resources" for enhancing an institution's reputation, it is no surprise that research orientation is highly correlated with a resources and reputation emphasis.

What is perhaps most interesting is the fact that the research orientation of the faculty has its strongest negative correlations with factors having to do with teaching and being oriented toward students: hours per week spent teaching and advising (r = -.83), commitment to student development (r = -.72), use of active learning techniques in the classroom (r = -.52), and the percentage of faculty engaged in teaching general education courses (r = -.52).

Student orientation of the faculty is primarily a perceptual measure reflecting the extent to which faculty believe that their colleagues are interested in and focused on student development. Typical questionnaire items that make up this factor are "Faculty here are interested in students' academic problems," "Faculty here are interested in students' personal problems," "Faculty are easy to see outside of office hours," "Faculty here are committed to the welfare of the institution," and "There are many opportunities for student-faculty interaction." There is one questionnaire item that gets a negative weight in the student orientation score: "Students are treated like numbers in a book."