A Benchmark Study of Scholarship-Related Activities in Engineering Technology

Journal of Engineering Technology, Fall 2006 by Aghayere, Abi, Buchanan, Walter W

Abstract

In the past, most Engineering Technology (ET) educators engaged only in teaching and consulting, with few participating in scholarly activities. However, in recent years, there has been a gradual shift, and scholarship is now required for promotion and tenure at many institutions with ET programs due to the evolving mission of these institutions. The three necessary ingredients for an activity to be classified as a scholarly activity are documentation, dissemination, and peer review of the activity. To underscore the importance of the new focus on scholarship, the Engineering Technology Council (ETC) of ASEE states in its 2003-2006 Strategic Plan's Goal #5, "The ETC will develop guidelines and promote appropriate scholarship for engineering technology educators." Further, Strategy 5C of Goal #5 in the ETC Strategic Plan highlights the need to "benchmark activities related to scholarship within the ET community."

In a recent paper,1 the ETC Task Force on Scholarship developed guidelines for scholarship in ET and proposed a faculty workload model. In a more recent paper,7 several strategies were presented for enhancing the scholarly productivity of engineering technology educators, and it was recommended that a benchmark survey of ET faculty scholarship be carried out to help determine, among other things, the appropriate level of scholarship for ET educators. This paper presents the results of the Fall 2004 and Spring 2006 ET Faculty surveys and correlation studies between selected variables in the surveys, and assesses the meaning of these results. The results obtained from this study may provide institutions the benchmark data they need to objectively evaluate their ET faculty in the area of scholarship, and to set a reasonable level of expectation for the scholarly productivity of ET faculty.

Introduction

Many institutions with Engineering Technology programs, including those for which teaching is the primary focus, now also require scholarship of their faculty in order to fulfill the evolving mission of these institutions. The importance of faculty scholarship to Engineering Technology has been discussed in earlier work by the Engineering Technology Council (ETC)Task Force on Scholarship.1 and their conclusion was that Engineering Technology faculty scholarship is essential for the continued vitality of Engineering Technology faculty and programs. Increasingly, tenure and promotion decisions in many EngineeringTcchnology programs and institutions are affected by the scholarly productivity of the Engineering Technology faculty member, although the level of scholarly productivity required for tenure and promotion at those institutions is often ambiguous. An Engineering Technology Scholarship Benchmark study is therefore needed because Engineering Technology educators need to know how much scholarship is required to attain tenure and promotion, and Engineering Technology administrators need scholarship benchmarks to make fair and objective decisions regarding tenure, promotion, annual evaluation, and merit raises.

Surveys of the non-instructional activities of faculty in American Universities and Colleges have been conducted by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES)-affiliated with the US Department of Education3,4 and by the University of Delaware.5,6 In the NCES surveys, carried out in 1987 and 1992, faculty from different colleges in the United States ranging from liberal arts colleges to research-intensive doctoral institutions were polled on their level of scholarly activities.The categories of scholarly activities included peer-reviewed journal papers and conference proceedings, conference presentations, books and book chapters, book reviews, non-refereed publications, and technical reports or monographs.The 1987 NCES survey showed scholarly productivity for faculty in American institutions to be 5.0 scholarly products per faculty per year.This includes one refereed article plus two conference presentations per year. In the 1992 survey, scholarly productivity was found to be 5.0 scholarly products per faculty per year, and this includes one refereed article plus two conference presentations per year. The average teaching load for faculty in all institutions was found to be 9.8 contact hours and 11 contact hours, respectively, in the 1987 and 1992 surveys.

Comprehensive Colleges and Universities are institutions where the highest degree offered is a master's degree; these are closest in nature to ET programs with the baccalaureate degree, or at most, the master's degree. For comprehensive institutions, the average scholarly productivity in the 1987 NCRS survey was found to he 3-7 scholarly products per faculty per year, and this includes one refereed article every two years plus two conference presentations per year. In the 1992 survey, the average scholarly productivity was 3.2 scholarly products per faculty per year, and this includes 0.8 relerccd articles every two years plus two conference presentations per year.The average teaching load for comprehensive colleges was found to he approximately 10.6 contact hours for both years.