Faculty In Disciplines Research Articles

Perceptions of the Student-Tutor Relationship with Chinese International Students at a UK University Self-Access Writing Centre

This paper discusses the findings of a study of the student-tutor relationship with reference to Chinese international students in a UK university self-access writing centre. The study collected semi-structured interview data from multiple cohorts, including Chinese students, writing tutors (professional English for Academic Purposes (EAP) teachers rather than student peer tutors) and the writing centre director. Three types of relationships (asymmetrical, symmetrical and quasi-symmetrical) are thereby identified and discussed. The most reported relationship found in this study was an equal/symmetrical relationship. This egalitarianism was interpreted from the perspectives of a) the learning atmosphere; b) responsibility distribution; and c) differences between the writing tutor and the degree programme lecturer (i.e., disciplinary faculty). The findings enhance the understanding of the student-tutor relationship between professional EAP writing tutors and international students in the UK higher education (HE) context, and pedagogical implications are duly put forward.

Are State Comprehensive Institutions Prepared for AI? Not yet.

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has profound implications for higher education and teaching and learning. The present study, conducted at a state, comprehensive university (SCU) is the US Midwest, evaluated how effective faculty in a leadership focused program are at differentiating between human or AI-generated content. Participants reviewed 12 “student assignments” representing short answer essays, and completed the following tasks: 1) evaluated the assignment on three dimensions of the grading rubric; 2) assigned a percent grade; 3) indicated whether it was human or AI-generated; and 4) provided a rationale for their selection. Evolving technologies like ChatGPT and other LLMS are forcing educators to reconsider how they will interact with students as well as redefine what will constitute scholarly work in the future. Based on the study, we offer short- and long-term implications regarding AI for both the field of leadership and, more broadly, for faculty in many social science disciplines at SCUs. An exercise at the end of the article allows readers to complete a brief interactive to provide them with a similar revelatory experience as our study participants (see Interactive Reader Activity) before reading the remainder of this article. The Interactive Reader Activity contains three samples from the study—each of which was either human written or AI-generated. Answers are provided.

DEPARTMENT CHAIR ROLES AND RESPONSIBILITIES IN WOMEN STEM FACULTY CAREER PROGRESSION AND SUCCESS

The purpose of this qualitative collective case study was to explore the perceptions and experiences of women faculty in STEM disciplines of the role of their department chair in their career progression and success. Of specific interest in the study were how they described the level of advocacy of department chair in their success and career progression, and how they described the knowledge and actions of their department chair relative to establishing and maintaining a collegial and equitable working environment. The study was framed by a conceptual framework that supports the role of the department chair responsibilities in faculty success. The study settings were two public, large, highest research-intensive universities located in the southern United States. Participants were 20 women STEM faculty. The findings indicated that many of the participants perceived that their department chair lacked sufficient training to advocate for them, did not always understand the differences in experiences between women and men faculty in STEM, nor their role and responsibility for ensuring collegial and equitable working environment. Some participants identified that their department chairs were committed to the work of equity and ensured department collegiality.

The First Amendment in Education: May Public Schools Discipline Faculty for Political Hate Speech?

The First Amendment in Education: May Public Schools Discipline Faculty for Political Hate Speech?

Going beyond good colleagues: Men’s and women’s perspectives on allyship behaviors toward women faculty in male-dominated disciplines in academia.

Going beyond good colleagues: Men’s and women’s perspectives on allyship behaviors toward women faculty in male-dominated disciplines in academia.

Aligning information literacy terminology to STEM disciplinary language used in the scientific method

Incorporation of information literacy into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) curriculum can be a challenge for academic librarians, in part due to different terminology than used by disciplinary faculty colleagues. Aligning terminology used in information literacy frameworks with the scientific method can provide a means of demonstrating the role of information literacy in STEM research. This paper maps the knowledge practices of the Association of College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education with an example of the scientific method. The resulting map provides an alignment of the different terminologies being used and visualizes the role of research skills throughout the process of conducting scientific research.

Undergraduate research and students’ learning outcomes: digging into different disciplinary contexts

ABSTRACT Despite the importance of undergraduate research for student learning and development, not enough work has been done to clarify its effects in different disciplinary contexts. Using data from the China College Student Survey, this research adopts Becher and Trowler’s theory of discipline classification to understand the relationship between undergraduate research and students’ learning outcomes in different disciplines. It indicates that first, contributing to journals/conferences correlates with students’ self-reported learning outcomes in Physics, History, and Engineering, but these relationships can be explained by process-centered activities, except in Physics. Second, early-year undergraduates’ learning outcomes are relatively weakly related to conducting research with faculty in pure disciplines. By contrast, such relationships are distinct in applied disciplines. Third, in soft disciplines, participating in competitions significantly correlates with more types of students’ learning outcomes than conducting research with faculty, while in hard disciplines, they both play quite important roles. It makes recommendations for future research and practice, which enrich insight into how universities can best engage undergraduates in research.

A Mathematics Educator Walks into a Physics Class: Identifying Math Skills in Students’ Physics Problem-Solving Practices

AbstractOne of the main goals of lower division “service” mathematics courses is to provide STEM-intending students with opportunities to engage in activities and contexts that can support their efforts to apply the mathematical ideas they are learning to successive major courses. The Mathematics Association of America has supported many mathematicians’ efforts to ask partner discipline faculty what topics and habits of mind they feel should be covered in mathematics classes to prepare them for their subsequent classes. We add to this work with a twist: Instead of asking physics faculty what they want students to know, we analyzed videos that students in an introductory physics class created so that we could ask ourselves what mathematical practices were most and least prevalent in the students’ physics problem-solving efforts. A qualitative analysis of the results, which we present here, indicated that most students were proficient in math practices involving problem setup and that the majority were able to apply mathematical concepts such as trigonometry and the solving of algebraic equations. However, only 44% of the student groups concluded their explanations by discussing answer reasonability and only 18% conducted a unit analysis to determine if their answers were applicable to the context of the problems assigned, even though both of these elements are important components of the overall sensemaking process. This report presents examples that illustrate these results and concludes with implications for teaching both entry-level mathematics and physics courses by modeling productive problem-solving and sensemaking practices.

The Birth of Medical Dramaturgy - On the Occasion of the Published Book of Academician Benjamin Djulbegovic: "An Impossible Decision - the Life Interrupted by Uncertainty".

The book "An Impossible Decision - the Life Interrupted by Uncertainty"has been published by Avicena Publisher in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2023 - ISBN: 978-9958-720-76-5. The aim of this article is to analize what is the most rational and ethical way to treat people facing life-and-death decisions and how do we exactly communicate these inevitable uncertainties that all of us will sooner or later face? Author of the book shows real-life relevance to patients often left alone to make these difficult decisions. Using the techniques of medical dramaturgy, this text brilliantly bridges science. The author of the book explained and proposed how to educate the public on how medical advances are made and how inferences and evidence are generated and appraised - in the best tradition of evidence-based medicine while highlighting uncertainties and inevitable trade-offs that accompany science, policies, and personal choices in the attempt to arrive at most satisfactory decisions. In addition to the general public, this play's important audiences are students and faculty in humanities disciplines and medical schools. These students are required to read many dense scientific, philosophical, and technical writings (many of which are referenced/annotated in the footnotes in the play). The play provides an exceptional teaching tool, which includes over 35 theoretical concepts to show how they can be applied to decisions relevant to all of us and what shared decision- making entails. Author's answer on the question "How to make the life and death medical decisions?" coul'd and shoul'd be: The method of using a playwright and Socrates dialogue format to connect the science of uncertainty with personal humanity decision will be appropriate. It will be important and quiet usefull for phisicians and, also, patients in healthcare practice, as joined decision makers.

De-colonizing one-shots: Critical pedagogies and the ACRL Framework

Librarians with instructional duties, particularly information literacy instructors or subject specialists, often rely on the “one-shot” format of instruction as a primary method for information literacy skills training and development. While not the only method of instruction, one-shots remain a foundational tool in information literacy instruction, although instructors are exploring other instructional formats. As a result, one-shots are regularly critiqued by librarians, who cite difficulties with the transactional nature and questionable effectiveness of the format. Many librarians cite concerns with the one-shot format based on time constraints, institutional culture, and discipline faculty discomfort with library instruction that is not directly and perceptibly tied to their own assignment requirements. More recently, conversations have highlighted the problematic nature of one-shots by uncovering the link between library instruction and faux neutrality, feminized labor, and campus power dynamics.

Disciplinary Faculty Information Literacy Teaching Practices at a Large Public University

Information literacy (IL) is generally accepted as an important learning competency in undergraduate education and is directly and indirectly mentioned in many national accrediting bodies’ standards. While information literacy has been seen as the sole domain of librarians, research shows that disciplinary faculty believe it is important and teach it in their classes. This study reports the findings from a survey conducted at California State University, Los Angeles on faculty’s information literacy teaching practices. The results show that faculty take responsibility for teaching all areas of information literacy and do so in a variety of ways.

A Systematic Review on Inquiry-Based Writing Instruction in Tertiary Settings

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates’ scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students’ writing needs in tertiary settings.

Interprofessional Education and Research in the Health Professions: A Systematic Review and Supplementary Topic Modeling

Interprofessional education (IPE) has grown in popularity over the years because it is effective in training future health professionals and serves as the engine of productivity in healthcare-related research. The research team, consisting of higher education faculty in various health profession disciplines, conducted a systematic review of existent IPE literature targeting both graduate and under-graduate students. The main purpose of the systematic review was to categorize research and analyze IPE studies to determine sub-constructs that entail both barriers and facilitators often related to occurrences in primary provider, learner, and researcher IPE initiatives. If identified, IPE training and related curriculum plans were also analyzed in this review. The research team wanted to identify any/all potential instances of the use of research activities in coordination with IPE training to identify underlying constructs to support future college and program-specific andragogy initiatives. Review results demonstrate three categorical constructs related to IPE initiatives in higher education health professions programs (provider, learner, and researcher stakeholder perspectives). Results further demonstrate provider IPE challenges surrounding limited resources and a willingness to participate, while both patient experience and teamwork foci were identified as common IPE session themes. Further, the learners’ perspectives included a challenge related to a willingness to participate, as well as the patient experience focus. Review constructs were further validated using supplementary topic modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that combined systematic review with a supplementary topic modeling. Findings support ongoing pedagogy and research efforts related to IPE activities for health professions programs in higher education.

Does Interdisciplinary Research Lead to Higher Faculty Performance? Evidence from an Accelerated Research University in China

The current trend of building accelerated research universities in China that explore the pursuit of interdisciplinary research (IDR) approach to yield academic excellence and innovation through institutional reforms is aspiring to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Employing data from faculty Curriculum Vitae and bibliometric records from a pilot accelerated research university in China, this study provides a case study to empirically quantify the impact of interdisciplinary research on 490 faculty’s performance, including research productivity, impact, and prestige. Results show that faculty involved in interdisciplinary research outperform their non-interdisciplinary counterparts in terms of research productivity, impact, and prestige. The degree of interdisciplinary as measured by subject categories is positively associated with faculty research performance. However, there are heterogeneous effects across faculty subgroups since faculty in applied-oriented disciplines reap more benefits while young faculty may suffer. Additionally, this study finds that faculty individual interdisciplinary research behavior can be affected by school-level concentration and dispersion of the degree of interdisciplinarity, which suggests the existence of peer effects.

Conceptions of Professional Expertise: Implications for Educating Future Librarians

Librarianship has struggled with professional identity and power relations, both within the profession, such as between librarians who serve customers face-to-face and those who create and maintain library systems (Harris, 1992), and outside the profession (e.g., on academic campuses, where librarians have maintained a subservient relationship with disciplinary faculty) (Julien & Pecoskie, 2009). Librarianship remains a feminized profession, which generates value from stereotypically female attributes, such as caring and service, rather than from recognized professional and intellectual expertise. VanScoy (2013) found that librarians who identify as women downplay their professional expertise when discussing public service activities. However, subsequent research did not find a similar tendency among librarians of color (VanScoy & Bright, 2017) suggesting that intersectional identities may be at play. These findings merit further study. While a feminist lens has been used to examine librarianship (e.g., Harris, 1992; Lew & Yousefi, 2017), feminism and intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) have not been applied to empirical work to a significant extent. We will present preliminary results of an ongoing study exploring librarians’ experience of professional expertise, examined through an intersectional lens. The project includes interviews with 30 librarians representing multiple identities including gender, race, type of role (public-facing and non-public-facing roles), and managerial level. The study intends to amplify marginalized voices, to better understand personal conceptions of professional expertise. This has implications for education future librarians, as they are coached to develop a sense of expertise to support their career ambitions. Implications for educating librarians are the focus of the poster.

Manifestations of deference behavior in teaching-focused academic librarians

This mixed methods study examined the manifestations of deference behavior in teaching-focused academic librarians in higher education. The study highlights examples of why teaching-focused academic librarians engage in deference behavior particularly when working with disciplinary faculty colleagues in the classroom. Findings indicate that despite being extremely qualified and competent, teaching-focused academic librarians often engage in deference behavior, and yield power to their disciplinary faculty colleagues out of fear of losing their jobs or being regarded as necessary, as well as a strategy to keep their jobs and maintain access to classrooms. Understanding the perspectives of teaching-focused academic librarians is crucial to advancing and sustaining the library profession, in addition to expanding the discourse of how disciplinary faculty can work with their librarian colleagues to dismantle the current structures and systems in place that uphold inequitable practices. Implications for research and practice are provided in order to bring awareness to the underlying reasons for deference behavior in teaching-focused academic librarians, and garner support for teaching-focused academic librarians who continue to navigate rocky terrain with their faculty colleagues.

Information Seeking Behavior of Nursing Faculty During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Academics Libraries have developed electronic collections to provide continuing services to their patrons especially during research. Databases and other scholarly online resources have become the main support system of many academic libraries. Beginning in March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic had a powerfully disruptive and transformative influence on libraries all over the world and some of the services were altered. The University of Memphis Libraries was not an exception. Meeting the challenges associated with significantly increased need for online content, the University Libraries continued to provide access to scholarly resources and supportive reference and instruction services to the diverse academic communities which include the Loewenberg College of Nursing with 52 full time faculty, 785 undergraduate students, and 261 graduate students enrolled on two campuses (Office of International Research, 2019). Branch librarians, authors of this paper, support the research of nursing faculty at each campus and seek to investigate their use and satisfaction with current Health Sciences online library resources during the COVID-19 pandemic. They also assessed their information-seeking strategies throughout. The data collected in a survey served to analyze access and use of library databases, search engines, and other online resources during research inquiries and queries specifically related to COVID19 information. While the focus group for this study is nursing faculty, findings from the study may also inform improved support of information-seeking faculty in other disciplines.

Teaching and its discontents

Teaching is a core role for librarians in academic contexts, although most librarians are not formally prepared to teach and encounter significant challenges in the role, including complex relationships with campus colleagues. The purpose of this research was to explore how community college librarians, an understudied population, understand their teaching role. Online interviews lasting fifteen to seventy-four minutes were conducted with thirty community college librarians who provide information literacy (IL) instruction. Participants were recruited by direct email invitation and were asked questions relating to their instructional practices. Interview transcripts were analysed qualitatively, with a specific focus on participants’ experiences of the teaching role. Participants reported positive relationships with students, and significant challenges in their relationships with disciplinary faculty and administrators. Their lack of formal preparation for the teaching role led to infrequent and informal assessment and evaluation practices. Pre-service education for the teaching role could be strengthened to provide librarians with the skill set and confidence to provide more effective instruction. Instructional quality is critical as the importance of IL is increasingly recognized as key to academic, workplace, and personal success.

Disciplinary Faculty Needs and Qualified Tutors in an EFL University Writing Center

This study investigates postgraduate (PGs) and faculty needs concerning academic writing (AW) tutors’ qualifications in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context. Tutors are the core element of a writing center (WC) (Hays, 2010). These professionals listen to (Burns, 2014), advise, and exchange information (Reid, 1993, in Hays, 2010) collaboratively so students can resolve their writing issues (Hays, 2010). However, in EFL contexts, scant research exists about WCs, writing programs (Molina & López, 2019), and qualifications to recruit tutors (Özer, 2020). Thus, to plan a WC, 24 participants in chemistry were interviewed and surveyed. Findings reveal that EFL PGs expect specialized tutors in target fields, with high English proficiency, experience in teaching, and in writing scientific articles. However, recruitment is challenging as candidate tutors also need support in AW and to help their tutees as writers. Thus, the tutors can be scientists, teachers, or PG students with English, but must be trained in specialized and general English writing and tutoring approaches. The study contributes to knowledge concerning needs in WCs and tutors’ qualifications, and it offers possible suggestions to accommodate the PGs’ preferences in an EFL context. However, the small sample size and homogeneity of the participants make the results nongeneralizable.

External Collaboration Results in Student Learning Gains and Positive STEM Attitudes in CUREs

The implementation of Course‐Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CUREs) has made it possible to expose large undergraduate populations to research experiences. For these research experiences to be authentic, they should reflect the increasing collaborative nature of research. While some CUREs have expanded with multiple schools across the nation, it is still unclear how a structured extramural collaboration between students and faculty from an outside institution affects student outcomes. In this study, we established three cohorts of students: 1) no‐CURE 2) single institution CURE (CURE) and 3) external collaborative CURE (ec‐CURE) and assessed academic and attitudinal outcomes. The ec‐CURE differs from a regular CURE in that students work with faculty member from an external institution to refine their hypothesis and discuss their data. The sharing of ideas, data and materials with an external faculty allowed students to experience a level of collaboration not typically found in an undergraduate setting. Students in the ec‐CURE had the greatest gains in experimental design, self‐reported course benefits, scientific skills and STEM importance. Importantly this study occurred in a diverse community of STEM disciplinary faculty from 2‐ and 4‐year institutions illustrating that exposing students to structured external collaboration is both feasible and beneficial to student learning.