Education Commons^™

The Role Of Faculty In Institutional Decision Making, Marisa Ann Galick Moazen

Doctoral Dissertations

Faculty participation in the governance of institutions of higher education is a critical element in the founding structure for American universities. This expectation and willingness to participate has been affected by contemporary factors such as accountability, shifting priorities among teaching, service, and research, corporatization, and retrenchment. Comparing faculty perceptions between Dykes 1968 landmark study and faculty today is important for determining if there has been a change in faculty’s view of their role. The purpose of this study was to explore faculty perceptions of their ideal and actual governance role within higher education and their satisfaction in those roles. The …

Physics Faculty Use Of Example Solutions In Teaching Introductory Physics, William O. Mamudi

Masters Theses

This study investigates how physics faculty perceive and use features of example problem solutions. Thirty physics instructors from diverse institutions participated in semi-structured interviews. In addition to open-ended questions, three example problem solution artifacts were used to focus on specific solution features. Data were analyzed to identify instructors’ goals for the use of example solutions and whether their goals were consistent with the solution features that they valued and used. The study concludes that many faculty have three major goals: keeping students cognitively involved, helping students become better problem solvers, and supporting students in learning physics. The study also found …

Family Policies And Institutional Satisfaction: An Intersectional Analysis Of Tenure-Track Faculty, Heather Lee Schneller

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Gender and faculty career advancement have been examined with a focus on academic work environment, including faculty workloads, mentoring relationships, access to research networks, and work-life balance. Previous studies concerned with gender, employment, and care work only have considered child care. Additionally, the exploration of faculty and care work focused specifically on gender instead of examining the interaction of race and gender. To date, no study on academic work-life policies includes faculty perceptions of their importance and effectiveness nor has the faculty assessment of eldercare policy been examined in relation to career success.

Guided by an intersectional perspective, this study …

Innovators And Laggards? Faculty Adoption Of Online Distance Education, Thomas Tailor Scott

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Over the past decade, institutions of higher education have seen enrollments in distance education, especially in the form of online learning, proliferate in striking numbers. In fact, some traditional colleges and universities are only experiencing real institutional growth in the areas of online learning. Even though a major push to increase the availability of distance education technology has occurred, effective adoption has not always followed suit. In hopes of speeding up the diffusion process, many colleges and universities have begun to contemplate the increased integration and institutional adoption of online learning. One of the most critical factors administrators must consider …

Faculty Turnover At American Colleges And Universities: Analyses Of Aaup Data, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Hirschel Kasper, Daniel Rees

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

This paper uses institutional level data collected by the American Association of University Professors as part of their annual survey of faculty members' compensation to analyze faculty turnover. Analyses of aggregate data over almost a twenty-year period highlight how remarkably stable faculty retention rates have been nationwide and how little they vary across broad categories of institutions. Analyses of variations in faculty retention rates across individual institutions stress the role that faculty compensation levels play. Higher levels of compensation appear to increase retention rates for assistant and associate professors (but not for full professors) and the magnitude of this effect …

A Brief Guide To The Aaup Salary Data, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The AAUP data not only document faculty salary levels, but may also play a role in determining future levels. They represent average data for all full-time faculty members at the university, excluding faculty in medical colleges and health sciences. Thus, they can not be used to compare salaries within a discipline across institutions. They have long been used, however, by faculty on budget or finance committees to inform discussions with central administrators regarding the parameters of the next year’s budget (e.g. tuition increases, faculty salary increases, and endowment payout rates). Often, the faculty and administration will agree on a …

Faculty Retirement Policies After The End Of Mandatory Retirement, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Michael J. Rizzo

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The findings we report above have implications for both institutions and their faculty members. In some states, rapidly growing college age cohorts will require academic institutions to hire large numbers of new faculty in the years ahead to fill positions created to meet the expanding demand for enrollments. Nationally, institutions will have to replace a large number of retiring faculty members in the years ahead. This suggests that most institutions’ concern in upcoming years will not be how to encourage their faculty members to retire. Rather, their concern will be how to continue to draw on the skills of …

My Professor Is Hot! Correlates Of Ratemyprofessors.Com Ratings For Criminal Justice And Criminology Faculty Members, Richard R. Johnson, Angela D. Crews

Criminal Justice Faculty Research

RateMyProfessors.com” ratings of the easiness, helpfulness, clarity, overall quality, and “hotness” of 407 criminal justice and criminology faculty members from across the United States were collected. Data were analyzed to determine what faculty characteristics determined these ratings. Experience working in the criminal justice field predicted higher ratings, while years of teaching experience was predictive of lower ratings. After controlling for instructors easiness and “hotness” ratings, the instructors’ ascribed characteristics (such as race and sex) explained the greatest proportion of variance in clarity, helpfulness, and overall quality scores. Professional characteristics, such as years of experience, publication rate, and possession of a …

The Loop (Fall 2012), Taylor University

The Loop (2012-2017)

The Fall 2012 edition of Taylor University’s The Loop.

2012-2013 Faculty, Cedarville University

Cedarville University Faculty

No abstract provided.

"That's Not My Job": Supporting Academics To Develop Information Literacy Skills In Content Courses, Angela Feekery

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

See presentation description.

Introduction: Choices In Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Society has high expectations for our educational system, and social science research should contribute to helping meet these expectations. Research on the choices that participants in the system make, and on the consequences of these choices, is particularly useful and often provides information that is directly relevant to the policy debate. Thus the four chapters in this volume all address the choices, and the consequences of choices, made by students, teachers, and school administrators. They are grouped together in this book in the belief that providing them this way will increase their influence on public policy.

Cornell Confronts The End Of Mandatory Retirement, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Michael W. Matier, David Fontanella

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In July 1995, the first author of this paper was appointed vice president of academic programs, planning and budgeting at Cornell and, at his initiative, a joint faculty-administrative committee was subsequently established, with him as chair, to look into how the university should respond to the elimination of mandatory retirement. In this chapter, we discuss the environment in which the university found itself when the committee was established, the recommendations of the committee, faculty reactions to the recommendations, and the actions that the university ultimately decided to pursue.

No Longer Forced Out: How One Institution Is Dealing With The End Of Mandatory Retirement, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

: [Excerpt] Why should academic institutions or their faculty care about the end of mandatory retirement for tenured faculty, which became effective in January 1994? From the perspective of an individual tenured faculty member who wants to continue her career beyond age seventy, the elimination is a welcome event. In the past, faculty members who wanted to remain active after reaching seventy had to negotiate their status with institutions that were under no legal obligation to allow them to continue. Now, however, tenured faculty members have the legal right to continue indefinitely in their tenured appointments. From the point of …

American Higher Education In Transition, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] In public higher education, tuition increases in recent decades have barely offset a long-run decline in state appropriations per full-time equivalent student. State appropriations per full-time equivalent student at public higher educational institutions averaged $6,454 in fiscal year 2010; at its peak in fiscal year 1987, the comparable number (in constant dollars) was $7,993 (State Higher Education Executive Officers 2011, figure 3), translating into a decline of 19 percent over the period. Even if one leaves out the "Great Recession," real state appropriations per full-time equivalent student were still lower in fiscal year 2008 than they were 20 years …

Do Historically Black Institutions Of Higher Education Confer Unique Advantages On Black Students? An Initial Analysis, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Donna S. Rothstein

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] Despite the declining relative importance of HBIs in the production of black bachelor's degrees, in recent years they have become the subject of intense public policy debate for two reasons. First, court cases have been filed in a number of southern states that assert that black students continue to be underrepresented at traditionally white public institutions, that discriminatory admissions criteria are used by these institutions to exclude black students (e.g., basing admissions only on test scores and not also on grades), and that per student funding levels, program availability, and library facilities are substantially poorer at public HBIs than …

Financial Forces And The Future Of American Higher Education, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Michael J. Rizzo

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Recent shifts in state funding are altering the most basic realities of American higher education, from student access to faculty research.

Career's End: A Survey Of Faculty Retirement Policies, Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

There are almost as many ways to retire from the academy as there are types of schools. But, as a recent study shows, institutional planning can prevent unpleasant surprises.

New Faculty And Staff Join Iwu, Sherry Wallace

News and Events

No abstract provided.

2012 Fall Faculty Conference: Community And Identity, Academic Affairs

Fall Faculty Conference

The 2012 Fall Faculty Conference features sessions on Mission to Vision, Learning Outcomes, Campus Wide Learning Goals and the Degree Qualifications Profile, and Disrupting Ourselves.

Studying Ourselves: The Academic Labor Market (Presidential Address To The Society Of Labor Economists, Baltimore, May 3, 2002), Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The study of academic labor markets by economists goes back at least to Adam Smith’s suggestion in The Wealth of Nations that a professor’s compensation be tied to the number of students that enrolled in his classes. This article focuses on three academic labor market issues that students at Cornell and I are currently addressing: the declining salaries of faculty employed at public colleges and universities relative to the salaries of their counterparts employed at private higher education institutions, the growing dispersion of average faculty salaries across academic institutions within both the public and private sectors, and the impact …

Pacific Review Fall 2012, Alumni Association Of The University Of The Pacific

Pacific Magazine and Pacific Review

No abstract provided.

Role Models In Education (Symposium Introduction), Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

It is our hope that by assembling these papers in one place, the Review will contribute to future policy debate on the importance of role models in education. Moreover, the papers' findings may have even broader importance. In many respects, the relationship between teachers and students can be viewed as analogous to the relationship between supervisors and employees. If the race, gender, and ethnicity of teachers "matter," so may the race, gender, and ethnicity of supervisors in the employment relationship. These papers thus suggest analogous types of research that could be profitably undertaken that relate to the employment relationship.

Do Teachers’ Race, Gender, And Ethnicity Matter? Evidence From The National Education Longitudinal Study Of 1988, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Daniel D. Goldhaber, Dominic J. Brewer

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

Using data from the National Educational Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS), the authors find that the match between teachers' race, gender, and ethnicity and those of their students had little association with how much the students learned, but in several instances it seems to have been a significant determinant of teachers' subjective evaluations of their students. For example, test scores of white female students in mathematics and science did not increase more rapidly when the teacher was a white woman than when the teacher was a white man, but white female teachers evaluated their white female students more highly than …

The Underrepresentation Of Minority Faculty In Higher Education: Panel Discussion, John Brooks Slaughter, Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Eric Hanushek

Ronald G. Ehrenberg

[Excerpt] The 3 July 2002 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education described the matter we are discussing today in these words: "Taken together. African-Americans and persons of Hispanic origin represent only 8 percent of full-time faculty nation-wide, and while 5 percent are African-American, half of them work at historically black institutions. The proportion of black faculty members at white institutions is 2.3 percent, virtually the same as it was 20 years ago." We are privileged to have the opportunity to explore this issue from two different perspectives. The first contends that unless major changes occur, the number of minority …

Numbers Are Not Enough: Women In Higher Education In The 21st Century, Sherry H. Penney, Jennifer Brown, Laura Mcphie Oliveria

Sherry Penney

Women are now the majority of students in institutions of higher education in the United States, and in many ways women as students and faculty have seen significant progress. But numbers do not tell the whole story. Subtle forms of discrimination continue to exist, and the higher up the pyramid you go, the fewer women are to be found, whether among tenured faculty, as presidents and provosts or as board members and board chairs. Many steps can be taken to improve the situation. Some institutions are recognizing that. We note some positive changes and discuss areas where improvement is needed. …

Gray, Bobbe Interview For The Miami Valley College Of Nursing And Health Oral History Project, Donna M. Curry, Natasha Clinton, Bobbe Gray

Wright State University - Miami Valley College of Nursing and Health Oral History Project

Donna Miles Curry and Natasha Clinton interviewed Bobbe Gray about the history of the Doctor of Nursing Practice program at Wright State University. In the interview Dr. Gray recalls her education and experiences in addition to the history of the DNP program.

Overcoming Barriers: How Community College Faculty Successfully Overcome Barriers To Participation In Distance Education, Matthew Meyer

Educational Foundations & Leadership Theses & Dissertations

To determine the primary barriers encountered by community college faculty in participating in distance education, community college faculty and administrators from community colleges in North Carolina and Virginia were surveyed using both quantitative and qualitative methods. Two separate online surveys were provided to faculty and distance education administrators (including chief academic officers) that included demographic questions and barrier assessment questions for both groups. Follow-up interviews were conducted among faculty and administrators at colleges that self-reported having successful or poorly performing distance education programs. To further frame the attributes of faculty participators and non-participators in distance education, the diffusion of innovations …

The Lived Experiences Of Faculty Who Use Instructional Technology: A Phenomenological Study, Heath V. Tuttle

Department of Educational Administration: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This qualitative phenomenological study was designed to gain an in-depth understanding of the lived experiences of university faculty who adopt technology for teaching and learning purposes and to determine if adoption affected the way a person taught, worked, and lived. A review of the literature found a gap in the understanding of the lived experiences of faculty who teach with technology, and this study was designed to help fill that gap.

Using a purposeful sampling method with a reputational technique, I targeted 20 faculty members who used technology to teach. The phenomenological method provided an understanding of their experiences as …

Pacific Review Summer 2012, Alumni Association Of The University Of The Pacific

Pacific Magazine and Pacific Review

No abstract provided.