A Benchmark Study of Scholarship-Related Activities in Engineering Technology

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

Correlation between Question #27 (Scholarship Requirements for Full Professor) and Question #39 (Highest Degree Offered):

For these two variables, we obtained a Pearson correlation coefficient of r = 0.7, indicating a weak linear relationship between the scholarship requirements to achieve a full professorship status and the highest degree offered by the institution. There is a very slight tendency towards higher requirements for achieving full professorship status at institutions which offer the doctorate degree compared with institutions where the highest degree offered is a master's or bachelor's.

Conclusions

The results of surveys of the scholarly activities of ET educators have been presented in this paper. The surveys, conducted via e-mail in the fall of 2004 and the spring of 2006. covered such areas as level of ET faculty scholarship, types of ET faculty scholarship, venues for disseminating ET faculty scholarship, and the level of financial support for ET faculty scholarship. We also carried out correlation studies between selected variables in the survey to determine what, if any, correlations exist. From the results obtained, several conclusions can be drawn:

* The median level of scholarly productivity self-reported by ET faculty is approximately one scholarly product per faculty per year.

* The median annual travel fund support for ET faculty is $1000 per faculty per year.

* The median level of scholarly productivity for ET faculty to achieve tenure is 1.5 scholarly products per year within the tenure probation period.

* The median level of scholarly productivity required by ET faculty to achieve full professorship status is a total of 9 scholarly products since the last promotion, in addition to national recognition. Some of the respondents noted that the number of scholarly products required for tenure and for promotion to lull professor are not defined at their institutions, hut they indicated that quality as well as quantity of scholarship are usually considered.

* The most frequently cited venues for dissemination of scholarship by ET faculty and the number of respondents who listed each venue were: ASEE- annual conference (87), IEEE Journals and conferences including FIE (32), ASME Journals and conferences (31 ), Journal of Engineering Technology (16), ASEE Regional conferences (10), NAIT (9), and CIEC (8).

* Scholarship in ET requires documentation, public dissemination and peer review, and is heavily skewed toward the scholarship of pedagogy and the scholarship of application.

* Consulting, in and of itself, is not considered scholarship unless it leads to publications, grant funding, or technical reports.

* A majority of the respondents reported that there was no requirement to show any linkage between IT faculty scholarship and student learning at their institution. However, in order to highlight the benefit of the non-instructional faculty activity of scholarship to all stakeholders, there needs to be some linkage between ET faculty scholarship and the quality of ET students' education. Several educators believe that faculty scholarship improves student learning, but it does not occur automatically, and must be engineered or purposely created."9