Summary Notes on "The Scholarship of Teaching," Chemical Engineering Education, by R. M. Felder, 34(2), 144 (2000).

Summarized by J. T. P. Yao, 7/12/00

"In his landmark 1990 monograph, Scholarship Reconsidered, Ernest Boyer observed that the work of the professoriate involves four different functions: discovery (advancement of the frontier of knowledge in a discipline), integration (putting research discoveries in broader contexts, making connections across disciplines), application (applying the outcomes of discovery and integration to socially consequential problems), and teaching (helping students to acquire specified knowledge and develop specified skills and attitudes). … According to Boyer, the elements that define teaching as a scholarly activity are mastery of the subject being taught, knowledge of pedagogical methods that have been proven effective at promoting learning and skill development, and commitment to continuing personal growth as an educator. To this list might be added involvement in educational research and development - designing, implementing, assessing, and disseminating innovative instructional methods and materials."

"Boyer proposes making the scholarship of teaching a legitimate basis for awarding tenure and promotion to faculty members who choose to make education a major focus of their careers. … This proposal - which as predictably encountered considerable skepticism and some outright hostility from administrators and professors - will gain widespread acceptance only if criteria for evaluating the scholarship of teaching are established and generally agreed-upon. I propose that the evaluation should entail answering three questions:

1. To what extent did the teaching qualify as a scholarly activity? …
2. How effective was the teaching? …
3. How effective was the educational research and development? …

The data that can be used to answer these questions fall into four categories: archival data (lists of courses developed and taught, representative instructional materials and student products, numbers of undergraduate and graduate students advised and faculty colleagues mentored, disciplinary and education-related conferences and workshop attended, education journals subscribed to, articles and books and courseware published); learning outcomes assessment data (test results, evaluation of written and oral project reports and other student products, student self-assessments); subjective evaluations by others (student end-of-course ratings, retrospective student and alumni ratings, peer ratings, awards and recognition received, reference letters); and self-assessment data (statement of teaching philosophy and goals, self-evaluation of progress toward achieving

the goals). …"

"Table 1 contains a matrix that may be used to custom-design a process for assessing the components of the scholarship of teaching. The more types of assessment data collected for a specific component (columns of the matrix), the more reliable, valid, and fair the evaluation of that component. …

Table 1. Assessment of Teaching and Scholarship of Teaching

[See the original table in the full-length paper that has more information than this abbreviated one.]

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