A Benchmark Study of Scholarship-Related Activities in Engineering Technology

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

Middaugh et al3 summarized the results from the NCES surveys as follows:"the American faculty member, on average, writes about two articles over a 24-month period, as well as a book review, perhaps a book chapter, and a monograph; and he or she might make four presentations at professional meetings."

The scholarship surveys discussed thus far were broad surveys of all faculty with no focus on engineering technology programs or programs for which teaching lias traditionally been the primary mission. To the authors knowledge, there have been only two scholarship surveys focusing on ET educators.The first survey by Buchanan2 ranked institutions on the basis of the scholarly contributions of their ET faculty by counting the number of articles published by ET faculty in the Journal of Engineering Technology2 between 1984 and 1994.The second survey, which was conducted in 2002 by the Engineering Technology Council (ETC)Task force on Scholarship.1 consisted of 14 questions pertaining to scholarly activities in lingineering Technology. However, neither survey addressed the issue of appropriate levels of scholarly productivity for ET faculty. Several recent works on scholarship in ET1,7 have helped define and refine the meaning of scholarship in ET and have proposed a number of strategies to enhance the scholarly productivity of ET faculty. However, issues and questions such as the appropriate level of scholarly productivity for ET faculty anil the appropriate level of support for ET faculty scholarship remain unaddressed.

To help answer these and other pertinent questions, the authors recently conducted a scholarship survey of ET programs and educators via e-mail and on the Engineering Technology Division Listserv. A two-pronged approach similar to that used in the Delaware Study of faculty out-of-classroom activity5,6 was adopted in this survey.

The survey instrument used in this project consisted of 43 questions and covered such issues as levels of ET faculty scholarship, venues for ET scholarship, types of ET scholarship, and average amount of travel fund support for ET faculty. It is a modified version of the instrument used in the Delaware Study.5,6 but with several additional questions pertinent to ET included. In the Fall 2004 survey, individual ET faculty as well as ET programs were surveyed, while in the Spring 2006 survey,only individual ET faculty were surveyed. The survey questionnaires tor individual ET faculty and ET programs are shown in the Appendix.The ET programs questionnaire which was emailed to ET department heads and chairs was designed to collect scholarship-related data for all ET faculty within a program. The results of this study apply only to four-year institutions except as specifically noted.

The Survey

The survey questionnaire (see Appendix 1) was sent via e-mail to ET faculty on the EDT listserv, and by e-mail to ETD department heads and chairs, and the surveys were administered on a weekly basis over a four-week period. The survey instrument was designed to collect self-reported data on scholarship-related activities over the preceding three-year period for the 2004 survey, and over the preceding 12 months for the 2006 survey.A total of 57 responses were received in the Fall 2004 surveys while 61 responses were received in the Spring 2006 surveys. Of the total 118 responses received in both surveys, 106 were from individual ET faculty representing more than 44 ET baccalaureate institutions or approximately one-third of the approximately 120 TAC-BET baccalaureate institutions, We believe that this constitutes a fair representation of ET faculty in baccalaureate TAC-ABET programs. There were 12 responses received from department heads of ET programs, and the number of responses was thought to be too small to be useful for statistical analysis. Therefore, in this paper, we will focus our analysis and discussions on the 106 individual ET faculty responses.