Missing minimum faculty standards

One of the safeguards for ensuring high quality instructors are minimum accreditation standards for faculty.

Yet these very important standards have never been fully implemented (see link below).

The same situational pressures (at least for two-year colleges) that have produced the out-of-field teaching problem at the secondary level also operate at the postsecondary level. OOF faculty are far less likely to teach effectively, and this negatively impacts students and the credibility of the administrators that consistently bend the rules for their friends.

Part of the problem in addressing this is that the “black box” of hiring practices at the institutional level is poorly understood, especially by scholars. What actually happens — how high quality instructors are hired — also deserves greater attention, in addition to the problem of the missing faculty minimum standards (HEA 1992).

Glen S. McGhee, Dir., at Florida Higher Accountability Project, at 9:05 am EDT on July 11, 2008

Frizbane Manely: Well- and Ill-Defined Problems

Frizbane Manley:

I, too, am struck by the observation that science and math students taught by less well qualified professors at lower levels (seem to) do better early on, only to run into difficulty in upper level work. See my “Finally” question below.

I’m guessing this is what Prof. Ethan was quite legitimately concerned about in our earlier conversation, one based on a fundamental misunderstanding between him and me. Yet without addressing key distinctions I was trying to make, he insisted that I was professing to teach disciplines for which I was not formally trained.

Not so. I was, quite rightly, claiming not just the right, but arguing the NEED, to incorporate interdisciplinary material, NOT disciplinary methodologies per se, into literary studies: texts, literary movements, the culture which gives rise to literary texts in the first place, and the social-historical IMPLICATIONS, including the notion of competing narratives of history itself—all for student consideration, not to impose dogmatic conclusions on them.

What, Frizbane Manley, do you think, are the implications of this study where our previous discussion on teaching students to work with necessarily ill-defined problems is concerned?

By the way, I’m wondering if “poststructuralism” and “postmodernism” are fancy terms for what cognitive psychologists have called “fuzzy boundaries” amidst well-defined problems. Perhaps the whole Sokal’s Hoax episode was in part the failure of Social Text’s editors to recognize the well-defined versus ill-defined distinction.

For a further discussion (and necessarily rough draft—I’m still working on it), see

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/06/26/qt

where you and I are discussing well- and ill-defined problems. I use a couple poems to illustrate why art cannot be sealed off into a realm unto itself: it’s social and historical.

Why students need to make the distinction goes right to social issues in technology: Whether we can build a nuclear reactor is a well-defined problem. Whether we ought to is ill-defined, and political. Whether our global economic institutions can maximize growth (as growth is presently defined) is one thing, whether they ought to another, and so on.

Finally, where does Teaching Evaluation stand with regard to Writing across the Curriculum?

James W. Gettys, at 10:20 am EDT on July 11, 2008

Misplaced Comment?

Sorry, folks. I had meant to respond to Frizbane Manley in other of today’s articles in IHE: “Confidence Gap for New Faculty.” I hope it’s (mis)placement here, however, is not too far off topic.

James W. Gettys, at 11:20 am EDT on July 11, 2008

portfolio grading

Mr. Halio, Hopefully, your post-facto analysis of student work is conducted objectively. I assume that you have third parties scrutinize random portfolios (without knowing what grade you gave them) and those third parties come to the same or similar grades that you came to. If not, your grading system is purely subjective and you are just playing favorites.

Larry, at 4:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2008

Grading/Humanities and “follow-up” : RE Definition of humanities

I wonder if the survey examined foreign language courses as part of the “Humanities” rubric. I have noticed very similar trends to those listed as in Math/Science: lower-degreee/experience types encourage continuing study, but the students usually do less well in later courses.What courses are included under “Humanities” and are the generalizations true across the board? Or are there enough courses to judge?

LM, at 8:15 pm EDT on July 11, 2008

Missing standards?

I followed the link in McGhee’s comment and, even after fixing the typo, could not find any evidence that the USAFA has faculty that do not meet the minimum accreditation standards. Glen, the USAFA is not a secondary school with HS instructors teaching CC classes. You owe them an apology, Glen.

One of the math faculty at our CC once taught at the USAFA and he has the highest standards of any of our math faculty. Just as this article states, students from his class might have lower grades but they know more than the ones that come out of the classrooms of some of our new faculty with similar credentials but less experience.

What interests me the most is that the exams were graded in common in the math department. That means the differences must arise from other factors, such as extra credit work, curving grades, or tipping students off so a cram-and-forget approach will produce higher grades but less learning. That last detail, prerequisites needed for later courses, is why they don’t see it in humanities classes. No one ever asked me about Greek history in my Russian literature class.

CCPhysicist, at 11:25 am EDT on July 12, 2008

“We find that the academic rank, teaching experience, and terminal degree status of mathematics and science professors are negatively correlated with contemporaneous student achievement, but positively related to follow-on course achievement. Across all subjects, student evaluations of professors are positive predictors of contemporaneous course achievement, but are poor predictors of follow-on course achievement.” [abstract of USAFA report]

So, “contemporaneous student achievement [sic]” is low when professorial expectations are high—a differential between the two exists—and students actually benefit from those high expectations (unbeknowst to them at the time) at a later time in the technical curriculum. All of which goes to show that the faculty in technical curricula know what they are doing and focus on the longer-term curriculum while students cannot see past the current course noses (nor frequently do they want to be held accountable for actually being expected to have learned, know, or review previous course content on their own but rather have it reviewed to their blissful pleasure to the detriment of current course content; water has never wanted to flow uphill, after all). The distortion at play is that the phraseology “student achievement” isn’t achievement at all, but a euphemism that for all practical purposes refers rather to “student short-sighted satisfactions” while high expectations or being held accountable on the part of a learned and far-sighted professoriate who are trying to educate students for the future and not simply please them for the now are simply “unsatisfactory” to students. “Satisfaction” = “holding higher principles hostage to lower” = “dissatisfaction.” When will higher education wake up and stop catering to the worst of tendencies found in every person and rather take responsibility for daring to teach to the highest of possibilities—however dissatisfying that may be to those who indulge in the narcissism implied in smug “satisfaction"? Hats off to some members of the USAFA who evidently do so—against increasing pressures.

Senior Professor, Professor of Chemistry, at 5:00 am EDT on August 11, 2008