The scholarship of teaching-learning

Yesterday I attended a colloquium on the scholarship of teaching-learning. I came away from it thinking that it is much tougher than what is being argued in institutional committees. All universities are now research focussed, but also have staff members who's first love is teaching. No problem says the managers. If you like doing different and interesting things with your class, why don't you also write a paper about it and we will get closer to our target outputs. While I am not against the idea of scholarship of teaching-learning - in every field there are a few people busy with 'whatever-your-field-is' education - I just want to say that it is tough and probably not the research growth area that bean counters are hoping for.

So here is some unsolicited advice to colleagues in the economic and management sciences who are interested in education research:

• Yes, it would be interesting to know what the impact of the educational / pedagogical intervention that you try in class is on academic performance, but it is going to be a lot of work to get such a study published in an economics journal. It is already going to be a lot of work to use clickers, blogs, or the flipped classroom, but economist reviewers will be asking hard questions about causality. If you want to show that group work helps with learning, you will have to control for everything and unobserved heterogeneity - that means a panel study or a randomised control trial. Now this is hard core research and a world away from a first love for teaching and doing interesting, fun things in class.
• Ok, you can say, forget the economists, I am going to try education journals with qualitative or mixed methods: develop a questionnaire, have focus groups and ask students what are their experience of group work and learning. But coming from an economics background you'll quickly realise that you don't speak the language of the journals and have not been trained in the methods. It is not group work, it is cooperative learning. And how does a good focus group discussion actually work? No R-squared there. Thus, to aim for education journals will mean that you have to do a lot of reading, get to know the schools of thought and the language and learn new methods.

Both of these are good options, but not quick or easy. We should not pretend that people who love teaching and are not that keen on on research can just go and write a few papers about what they do in class. MOAR research! may have to come from somewhere else.

Links for academics

This week I came across a few nice posts for academics. You don't have to be an economist, young or established academic to hopefully find this interesting as well:

• GradHacker blog explains how you should think about your PhD as a research apprenticeship.
• Indecision blog explains that it takes time to find your research "thing". One good point: "rather than trying to decide what you should do, think about: what do I keep coming back to every time I come up with ideas?"
• At The Economist's View, Mark Thoma writes about the time he discovered an error in a Bernanke & Blinder paper in AER, but then "author prestige" got in the way.
• Following the Reinhart & Rogoff incident, Betsy Stevenson and Justin Wolfers provides some tips on how non-experts and policymakers can identify the good research out there.
• Dave Giles at the Econometrics Beat had a nice post about when the adjusted R-squared will increase.

Enjoy them.

Advice for post-grads

This week we are receiving the Master's degree students of 2013 in the School and I am busy updating a few presentations. Along with the usual advice on how to approach the research proposal and tips and trick for academic writing, I also want to share my thoughts on how they can add value to the post-grad experience. This goes along with a post from last year about thinking like a researcher.

So I make a few PowerPoint slides and would love to get more input:

A few links and thoughts for managers

Now that I am School director I'm spending more time in meetings, listening to senior managers' ideas about the campus plan for 2013 and I'm reading more posts in The Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed. In many ways our NWU, or South African challenges are more universal than we think. Here are three quick perspectives.

Last week Higher Education Research Institute at the University of California at Los Angeles released their survey of faculty (academic staff members') activities and attitudes. The survey reached more than 23 000 faculty members at four-year colleges and universities in the US. The table below shows activities and time spent:

How Faculty Members Report Spending Time, in Hours per Week, 2010-11

	0	1-4	5-8	9-12	13-16	17-20	21+
Schedule teaching	5.8	15.8	34.6	28.6	9.2	3.7	2.1
Preparing for teaching (including grading)	4.9	11.5	24.4	22.4	13.9	12.1	10.7
Advising and counselling students	4.4	56.7	27.1	7.8	2.2	1.1	0.7
Committee work and meetings	7.6	58.0	23.7	6.8	2.2	1.3	0.4
Other administration	30.6	39.7	13.8	6.6	3.4	2.7	3.2
Research	13.1	30.3	19.2	12.9	6.9	6.0	11.7

The report shows that time spent on teaching is less than the years before, but time spent on research is not notably up. Many faculty members spend small but regular chunks of time each week on committee work, advising, research and other activities. I am keen to compare this to our School where most of the staff would fall in the 5-8 hours of teaching per week bracket. It is clear that the faculty members in the survey do not get close the the NWU's idea of splitting their time 40:40:20 between teaching, research and community / commercialisation.

Another interesting table shows what is happening in class:

Men, Women and Teaching Methods in Used in All or Most Courses

Method	Men, 2001-2	Women, 2001-2	Men, 2010-11	Women, 2010-11
Extensive lecturing	54.6%	34.1%	52.7%	33.8%
Class discussions	68.3%	78.9%	78.3%	88.0%
Cooperative learning	32.6%	55.8%	48.5%	68.8%
Student presentations	30.4%	45.2%	36.9%	53.8%

Faculty members seem to be moving to more student-centered approaches, but the men still seem to prefer more lecturing. This is specifically the case in the so-called STEM fields (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics). This week our campus is hosting a conference on teaching excellence and I am excited to go and have a look at what the top lectures are doing in their courses.

Finally, the report shows that these academics are stressed. The challenge for a manager though is that "teaching load" or "committee work" are not the big stressors. Items like self-imposed high expectations, working with under-prepared students and research or publishing demands rank much higher. Empowering staff to take their teaching or research to the next level will require more than just giving them more time. I think that training is one part, but I also like the idea of nudging. Maybe exposing people to that next level quality will inspire their own efforts.






This brings me to two other interesting posts. Margaret Wente writes in the Globe and Mail that Canadian Universities will have to choose between access and quality. The problem starts with government's goals of access and mass participation. But:

Academics insist that universities must not become job factories. Their mission is to guide students to cultivate the life of the mind. But there’s a big disconnect between what academics want and what students want. For students, higher education is all about the job. Yet, they get virtually no counselling about what returns they can expect for their investment, or what their job prospects might be.

She goes on to argue that changing this will be difficult and outlines a number of points that sound familiar in SA as well: Big classes, more teaching done by part-time staff (adjuncts), all the incentives for research. Her solution is a bold one:

Give more research money to the most productive researchers, and far less to the rest. Let’s abandon our cherished egalitarianism and fund our leading research universities properly, so they can compete on the world stage. Let’s develop a tier of teaching universities that are excellent at what they do. The result would be smaller classes and lower tuition, a win-win all around.

I also do not think that universities should become job factories, and I disagree with the article's idea that there should be greater government intervention, but I agree that the system as it is set up, is a danger to undergraduate teaching and in the end post-grads and research will suffer for it as well.




Finally, the Chronicle writes about a Michael Rizzo, a full-time lecturer in economics at the University of Rochester, and argues for two tracks for faculty - teaching, or research. The idea put forward is:

But what if the academic work force were made up primarily of two types of faculty members? One, a small proportion of tenure-track professors—those who earn doctoral degrees, do research, train graduate students, teach advanced seminars, and help administrators run the university. And two, a larger portion of full-time instructors, like Mr. Rizzo, who teach undergraduates, help advise them, keep up with developments in the field by reading and attending conferences, but do no research. Instead of earning Ph.D.'s, like those on the tenure track, instructors could stop with a master's degree, as many in the adjunct teaching pool already do.

At the NWU this idea is heresy: we recently scrapped the idea of a teaching-learning associate professorship. But then management also has this idea that we can't have all these part-time lecturers on the  school's budget. Who is supposed to do the teaching then? Or the other way around, if everyone's teaching, who's supposed to do the research then? As an economist I am in favour of the idea of the division of labour and specialisation. If everyone has to do everything, there can be limited gains from trade.

In conclusion, I don't have answers to these different questions, but I do find it interesting that there are many more people out there, thinking about them.

Geographical economics insights for your post-grad studies

Last week I wrote about how post-grads can come to think like researchers. It involves thinking, reading, writing and analysis, followed by more of each until your supervisor says you can stop. There are steps in this process. The thinking and reading is especially important for figuring out the paradigm, approach and methodology steps. Applying the method and using the instruments is the analysis part of the process, but will also involve more reading and learning. Of course everything needs to be written up with crystal clarity.

 

Few people are likely to be complete naturals at all this, which means that there is a demand for mentoring and coaching and a supply of books, blogs and "how to" guides. At last week’s seminar Prof Trafford also proposed some stepping stones to developing episteme:

  

But how would a university, a supervisor or a student go about creating and participating in an environment in which these things happen? Thinking about all this, I wondered whether there might not be some insights from geographical economics:

Geographical economics	Your post-grad studies
Economic activity occurs in agglomerations.	Your research has to take place in an academic agglomeration of the supervisor, other Profs, post-docs, fellow post-grad students and the friendly staff at the library. You cannot disappear for six months and expect to come back with answers.
Growth is driven by external economies of scale from four sources:	To do more and better research requires:
Infrastructure – lowers the cost of production.	You will need basic hardware to do the work. A Department or School can upgrade the PCs and software in the post-grad lab. For students this means using your scholarship money to buy a laptop instead of a PS3.
Diversity of intermediate inputs – there are benefits from scale and specialisation.	The literature that you are reading and data for your analysis are the raw materials. The intermediate inputs are the interactions with and feedback from anyone and everyone. This means having regular scheduled meetings between supervisor and student, attending workshops and seminars. A post-grad can never be too busy for this and when you attend, you need to participate – remember that a good question is a compliment to the speaker and a complement to agglomeration-driven research!
Matching in the labour market – better matching between employers and employees increases efficiency and lowers cost.	Students and supervisors can be matched by interest and by skills. Diversity or specialization can be beneficial, depending on the agglomeration. Students often have a better idea about who they want to work with than supervisors do! Matching with peers is also important. Get to know the post-doc who has been there and did it, or make friends with the Stata programming whizz.
Knowledge spillovers – ideas and innovations are in the air and drive growth in agglomerations.	These are the spillovers that occur aside from the intermediate inputs and improved matching. It happens when you go for a coffee or a beer and someone mentions the cool new article in AER that they have been reading. This is about research culture and its spillovers.

So, in research agglomerations you find lots of people busy reading, writing, analyzing, presenting their results and providing inputs for one another. But what if you are the only PhD in the village, whose supervisor is busy teaching or managing, if there are no seminars or anyone to have an AER-related beer with? I believe that there are things you can and should do to get closer to the action:

• Library resources are great for tracking down the peer-reviewed published work, also sign up for a RSS reader and start following blogs. You may not have been at the seminar but the blogs are where the fresh new work is reported and you can make comments as well.

• Many researchers and academics also tweet. These are the bits of conversations and references to resources that you might otherwise be missing by sitting out in the sticks. Join the conversation.

• You should actually blog and tweet about your work. Very few people have speaker’s block, buy many post-grads complain about writer’s block. Writing blogs will provide practice in expressing your ideas. You do not have to share great insights yet – write about and interpret the articles you have been reading, or post the code that you have been struggling to program. If someone ever asks what you have been up to, you will have something to show.

• If you are tweeting and blogging, following other researchers and sending your comments, make sure that you manage your online profile – put up the privacy settings on those undergrad party photos on Facebook and rather start using LinkedIn and SlideShare to promote yourself and your work.

• Journals may not publish the work that you have right now, but maybe someone will be interested in a book review or even letting you review an article. You are reading anyway so send an e-mail to a few editors and ask if they would keep you in mind.

• Finally, keep your ears open for workshops or conferences that are close by and inexpensive. That conference in Istanbul sounds nice, but you are more likely to get good feedback at UCT. When you do get the opportunity, make the most of it: make an excellent presentation, have your business card, v card, QR code to your webpage ready, do not disappear from sessions to explore the town, participate, make comments, ask questions and do not skip the conference dinner, network with the young guns and the legends.