An Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States Engineering (1982) / Chapter Skim
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II. Methodology
II. Methodology
Pages 13-32
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From page 13... ...
Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance Both the planning committee and our own study committee have given careful consideration to the types of measures to be employed in the assessment of research-doctorate programs. m e committees recognized that any of the measures that might be used is open to criticism and that no single measure could be expected to provide an entirely satisfactory index of the quality of graduate education.
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From page 14... ...
A total of 16 measures (listed in Table 2.1) have been utilized in the assessment of research-doctorate programs in chemical engineering, civil engineering, electrical engineering, and mechanical engineering.
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From page 15... ...
Fraction of FY1975-79 program graduates who at the time they completed requirements for the doctorate reported that they had made definite commitments for postgraduation employment in Ph.D.-granting universities. Reputational Survey Results4 08 Mean rating of the scholarly quality of program faculty.
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From page 16... ...
Other measures, such as those relating to university library size and support for research and training, describe some of the resources generally recognized as being important in maintaining a vibrant program in graduate education. Measures derived from surveys of faculty peers or from the publication records of faculty members, on the other hand, have traditionally been regarded as indices of the overall quality of graduate programs.
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From page 17... ...
In identifying program graduates who had received their doctorates in the previous five years {FY1975-79) ,7 the faculty lists furnished by the study coordinators at universities were compared with the names of dissertation advisers (available from the NRC survey)
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From page 18... ...
Consequently, in the discipline with the fewest graduates per program-civil engineering -- only slightly more than half the programs are included in these measures, whereas almost 90 percent of the electrical engineering programs are included. Measure 04 constitutes the fraction of FY1975-79 graduates of a program who had received at least some national fellowship support, including National Institutes of Health fellowships or traineeships, National Science Foundation fellowships, other federal fellowships, Wood row Wilson fellowships, or fellowships/traineeships from other U.S.
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From page 19... ...
Measure 06 represents the fraction of FY1975-79 program graduates who reported at the time they had completed requirements for the doctorate that they had signed contracts or made firm commitments for postgraduation employment (including postdoctoral appointments as well as other positions in the academic or nonacademic sectors) and who provided the names of their prospective employers.
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From page 20... ...
Percentages are based on respondents to the NRC's Survey of Earned Doctorates who indicated that they had made firm commitments for postgraduation employment and who provided the names of their prospective employers. These percentages may be considered to be lower-bound estimates of the actual percentages of doctoral recipients employed outside the academic sector.
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From page 21... ...
4 -- as was done in the Car tter and Roose-Ander~°A detailed analysis of the survey participants in each discipline is given in subsequent chapters. This information was furnished to the committee by the study coordinators at the universities participating in the study.
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From page 22... ...
Of particular interest is the relatively high rate of response from chemical engineers and the low rate from those in electrical engineering -- the latter may be related to the difficulties encountered in distinguishing between
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From page 23... ...
m e ratings were furnished on the following scale: 5 Distinguished 4 Strong 3 Good 2 Adequate 1 Marginal O Not sufficient for doctoral education X Don't know well enough to evaluate In assessing the effectiveness of a program, evaluators were asked to consider the accessibility of faculty, the curricula, the instructional and research facilities, the quality of the graduate students, the performance of graduates, and other factors that contribute to a program's effectiveness. This measure was rated accordingly: 3 Extremely effective 2 Reasonably effective 1 Minimally effective O Not effective X Don't know well enough to evaluate Evaluators were instructed to assess change in program quality on the basis of whether there has been improvement in the last five years in both the scholarly quality of faculty and the effectiveness in educating research scholars/scientists.
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From page 24... ...
As might be expected, the smaller and less prestigious programs were not as well known, and for this reason one might have less confidence in the average ratings of these programs. For all four survey measures, standard errors of the mean ratings are reported; they tend to be larger for the lesser known programs.
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From page 25... ...
Data from another NRC survey suggest that the actual fraction employed outside academia may be significantly higher. m e committee recognized that the inclusion of nonacademic evaluators would furnish information valuable for assessing nontraditional dimensions of doctoral education and would provide an important new measure not assessed in earlier studies.
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From page 26... ...
In each discipline data are recorded for the 100 universities with the largest R&D expenditures. Unfortunately, these data are available only for aggregate expenditures in engineering and are not for expenditures in the individual engineering disciplines; thus, the value reported for an individual program represents the total university expenditures in engineering.
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From page 27... ...
PUBLICATION RECORDS Data from the 1978 and the 1979 Science Citation Index have been compiled2 2 on published articles associated with research-doctorate programs. Publication counts were associated with programs on the basis of the discipline of the journal in which an article appeared and the institution with which the author was affiliated.
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From page 28... ...
Moreover, these measures do not take into account the differing sizes of programs, and the measures clearly do depend on faculty size. Although consideration was given to reporting the number of published articles per faculty member, the committee concluded that since the measure ineluded articles by other individuals besides program faculty members, the aggregate number of articles would be a more reliable measure of overall program quality.
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From page 29... ...
associated with four electrical engineering programs are reported in Table 5.1 as follows: Program Raw Value Standardized Value A 1 41 B 2 42 C 11 45 D 16 47 26Since the scale used to compute measure 16 -- the estimated "influence" of published articles -- is entirely arbitrary, only standardized values are reported for this measure. 27The conversion was made from the precise raw value rather than from the rounded value reported for each program.
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From page 30... ...
Thus, the reader is urged to-take note of the raw values before attempting to interpret differences in the standardized values given for two or more programs. m e initial table in each chapter also presents estimated standard errors of mean ratings derived from the four survey items (measures 08-11~.
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From page 31... ...
-- i.e., the observed difference in mean ratings is too large to be plausibly attributable to sampling error.3~ The final chapter of this report gives an overview of the evaluation process in the four engineering disciplines and includes a summary of general findings. Particular attention is given to some of the extraneous factors that may influence program ratings of individual evaluators and thereby distort the survey results.
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