Learning outcomes with non-tenured professors

[flyingiguana]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/education/study-sees-benefit-in-courses-with-nontenured-instructors.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&_r=0

 

"While many higher education experts — and parents — bemoan the fact that tenured professors are a shrinking presence, now making up less than a quarter of the academic work force, a study released Monday found, surprisingly, that students in introductory classes learned more from outside instructors than from tenured or tenure-track professors. "

 

 

Course, it looks at only one university.

[regentrude]

I am very cautious about drawing any inferences here. The one mechanism that might conceivably lead to a better outcome for non tenured faculty is that bad teachers simply get fired - whereas tenured faculty can't get fired even if they are abysmal teachers.

 

This said:

 

 

 

Students taught by untenured faculty were more likely to take a second course in the discipline and more likely to earn a better grade in the next course than those whose first course was taught by a tenured or tenure-track instructor, the report said.

 

Have they controlled for the kind of course and the major of the students?

Let's imagine the following scenario:

The physics majors are taught intro physics by a non tenured professor, they absolutely will take further classes in that discipline.

the biology majors are taught intro physics by a tenured professor; they will not take further physics.

Does that say anything about the quality of the instructors?

 

Gotta run... this untenured professor needs to go teach students (with hopefully good outcomes)

[HelenNotOfTroy]

Did they control for whether the class was actually taught by the professor or by a teaching assistant grad student?

FYI, it took a following a bunch of links to make it to the actual paper: http://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2013/IPR-WP-13-18.pdf

 

Note that this was non-peer reviewed working paper was published in the same NBER journal that got in trouble earlier in the year for the now-disgraced Reinhart-Rogoff paper about the value of Economic austerity.

 

[regentrude]

 

FYI, it took a following a bunch of links to make it to the actual paper: http://www.ipr.northwestern.edu/publications/docs/workingpapers/2013/IPR-WP-13-18.pdf

 

Is it just me, or is this extremely difficult to read? Honestly, if my children wrote a convoluted sentence like this, I would return the paper for editing:

 

 

We bring to bear the first evidence within the research university setting regarding

the relative effect of professors within the tenure system as opposed to those outside it

where we can observe student performance in subsequent classes in the same subject.

[go_go_gadget]

Just anecdotally, I've had excellent and poor instruction from both tenured and non-tenured professors, in approximately equal proportions. The only difference was that the untenured bad professors didn't last long, and the bad tenured ones are still around. 

[mommymilkies]

I've had the opposite experience.  The only thing I can think of would be that tenured professors don't always like teaching intro classes year after year and are likely less enthusiastic.  That happened to me in one chemistry course.  I still hate that man.  He thrived on making us cry.  However, I've had several unqualified non-tenured instructors teach my classes, such as the accountant teaching my computer class (he admitted he's never even taken a computer course).

[G5052]

Yes, I think the background of the paper is iffy.  

 

The community college I work for has done several studies, and there is no statistical difference between full-time and adjunct professors past their first year or so of teaching.  I read the study they did and felt like that had done a good job with a range of classes at different campuses and at different times of day (night students and professors are a slightly different culture than daytime students and professors).  I'll note though that they did away with tenure about 10 years ago or so if memory serves me.  And they also no longer have part-time professors (thank you, healthcare reform).  You're either full-time, or an adjunct on contract semester-by-semester who can teach a maximum of 10 credit hours a semester total in the state community system (so no more piecing together full-time work at multiple colleges).

 

They usually seem to do a good job at hiring adjuncts, from what I've seen.  I know of a few last minute hires that I know weren't put under contract the following semester.  Most at the college I work for are long-term adjuncts.

Is it just me, or is this extremely difficult to read? Honestly, if my children wrote a convoluted sentence like this, I would return the paper for editing:

 

It isn't just you.  I think it is because the authors are social scientists, they write neither with the clear precision of a hard scientist, nor with the grace of someone in the humanities.  :-)

 

On a serious note, I don't understand how the social sciences, like economics, can be called sciences.  In this paper, while it is clear they are collecting data, it is also clear that not only can they not control all the variables, they have not idea what they all are.  Several posters have already proposed more variables they didn't consider: time of day, type of major, etc.  Maybe some would say "economics is not an experimental science", and I guess that's true, but if you can't run controlled experiments in any particular discipline, how can that be called any kind of science?

[flyingiguana]

It isn't just you.  I think it is because the authors are social scientists, they write neither with the clear precision of a hard scientist, nor with the grace of someone in the humanities.  :-)

 

On a serious note, I don't understand how the social sciences, like economics, can be called sciences.  In this paper, while it is clear they are collecting data, it is also clear that not only can they not control all the variables, they have not idea what they all are.  Several posters have already proposed more variables they didn't consider: time of day, type of major, etc.  Maybe some would say "economics is not an experimental science", and I guess that's true, but if you can't run controlled experiments in any particular discipline, how can that be called any kind of science?

 

Uh, well, all the "hard" science research I've done in both biology and physics has involved a lot of variables that we couldn't control.  We do measure everything we can and add it to the analysis, but it's a little hard to control a variable when it's something being spewed off the sun and is in a region of space we can't get to.

 

If you only do studies where you can control variables, you can't ask a lot of the interesting questions. 

[Candid]

Uh, well, all the "hard" science research I've done in both biology and physics has involved a lot of variables that we couldn't control.  We do measure everything we can and add it to the analysis, but it's a little hard to control a variable when it's something being spewed off the sun and is in a region of space we can't get to.

 

If you only do studies where you can control variables, you can't ask a lot of the interesting questions. 

 

 

I agree a lot of systems that you would want to study have too many variables to control. 

 

Social scientists instead measure as many variables as they can and do analysis of variance to determine which variables come into play. Sometimes those variables can come out of no where and seem insane. I can remember in a stat class learning multiple analysis of variance tests that we used census data. One of our projects was to determine why people migrated from state to state. The problem was that biggest factor in the data set was suicide rate, the higher the suicide rate the higher the proportion of new residents in a state.

 

I suppose technically they aren't really do a pure experiment at all, because they don't randomly assign subjects to groups, but even in other sciences involving humans this is true as well. While doctors can randomly assign patients to treatments they can't keep patients in the groups, or control their diets, etc. Instead they try to collect that data and measure the variance. 

[TravelingChris]

One of the best teachers I ever had was a judge who taught a criminal law class.  She was an adjunct professor.  I have had good classes from adjunct, tenured and non-tenured professors.  So have my kids who have taken college classes and though I haven't asked dh, he would probably say the same thing. 

 

  Now the worse class I ever had was a tenured professor of biology who was literally teaching the exact same class for probably fifteen or twenty years.  It was a popular class- field biology- and I did like going on the field trips- but his teaching was horrible and he had not updated anything in that twenty years.  Now I did learn quite a bit about plants and still remember a lot to this day but none was from his teaching- just from the field trips and the research paper I did on growing plants in low water and/or high salinity areas.  I got a bad grade on the paper,C,  for no apparent reason at all, probably just because I had used recent research studies that he never had read (because he never seemed to do any research or learning at all) and maybe he thought the papers were not true (since these were new discoveries about plants) or maybe it was just that my paper actually had potential practical applications or who knows what.  Now just to emphasize that I was not a bad paper writer, I didn't get any papers graded C in any other class that year or the year following or preceding and I was at a non-grade inflated school.