Carnegie Report Calls for New Standards
to Rate Teaching, Service, and Research
By
DENISE K. MAGNER
Teaching and service by professors should be evaluated by the same
standards that are used to judge the quality of research, says a report
released today by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
Until that is done, the report says, teac hing and service will never
have as much respect as research when it comes to hiring and promotion
decisions.
The long-awaited report, Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the
Professoriate, is the sequel to an influential Carnegie report
that appeared in 1990, Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of
the Professoriate.
Together, the two reports are intended to help colleges and universities
achieve a better balance in evaluating the teaching, research, and
service activities of scholars.
In the promotion and tenure policies used by most institutions, the
standards for such evaluations are "very different," says Mary Taylor
Huber, a senior scholar at the Carnegie foundation and one of the
report's three authors. "The policies assume that s tandards for research
come solely within the discipline, standards for teaching are defined
by the institution, and they seldom give any guidelines for applied
scholarship or service."
The report lists six standards that, it says, can be used to evaluate
faculty work in any form: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate
methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective
critique. "Their very obviousness suggests their applicability to
a broad range of intellectual projects," the report says. Scholarship
Assessed also discusses the importance of documenting whether
a scholar has met those standards, and describes some ways that institutions
already are doing so. For example, it hails a project under way at
the American Association for Higher Education to explore the peer
review of teaching.
"We are convinced," the report's authors say, "that it is indeed possible
to find standards that can be applied to each kind of scholarly work,
that can organize the documentation of scholarly accomplishments,
and that can also guide a trustworthy process of faculty evaluation."
Dr. Huber and her two co-authors, Charles E. Glassick and Gene I.
Maeroff, reviewed the evaluation criteria used by refereed journals,
scholarly presses, and government agencies and foundations. The authors
also looked at teaching-evaluation forms and other documents used
by promotion-and-tenure committees on campuses.
"These people don't communicate with each other on this question,
yet they were all using the same criteria," says Dr. Glassick, a senior
associate at the Carnegie foundation. "It made us think that maybe
there really is one community of scholars all work ing in the same
way. If we get that idea into the system, maybe we'll have an easier
time pulling teaching and service into the promotion system."
The report builds on the foundation laid by Scholarship Reconsidered,
which was released just as an intense debate was getting under way
over the appropriate balance to draw between research and teaching
in evaluating faculty work.
The foundation's 1990 report proposed broadening the notion of "scholarship"
beyond its traditional focus on the discovery of new knowledge. Scholarship
Reconsidered suggested that teaching be considered scholarship,
as should the work that profess ors do in "integrating" knowledge,
such as making connections within or between disciplines. And it said
that certain "service" activities should be viewed as scholarship
-- not professors' work on campus committees but what it called the
"application of knowledge," such as scholarly efforts to help the
local community, the state, or the nation on important issues of the
day.
As part of the new report, the Carnegie foundation conducted a national
survey in 1994 of 1,380 four-year colleges and universities to determine
whether they were thinking about changing the way faculty roles were
defined and faculty members rewarded. The foundation heard back from
865 chief academic officers, for a response rate of 63 per cent. The
results are published for the first time in Scholarship Assessed.
The survey found that a movement to re-examine faculty roles and rewards
was indeed afoot. More than 80 per cent of the respondents said they
were looking at those issues or planned to. Most institutions said
they had already made changes to better reward good teaching. Two-thirds
said they now gave awards for teaching excellence and offered sabbaticals
for professors to improve their teaching.
However, only 50 per cent said they gave raises to reward good teaching,
and only 28 per cent had established centers for teaching improvement
on their campuses.
While 69 per cent of the institutions said they had developed new
methods of evaluating teaching, less progress was reported on other
fronts. Only 38 per cent said they had devised new ways of evaluating
applied scholarship or student advising. Copies of Scholarship
Assessed are available for $15.95 each from Jossey-Bass Inc.,
Publishers, 350 Sansome Street, Fifth Floor, San Francisco, Cal. 94104;
by calling (888) 378-2537; or by sending a facsimile to (800) 605-2665.
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