Relationships between Teaching and Research?Author(s): Michael Batty and Stephen A. MatthewsSource: Area, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1988), pp. 158-162Published by: The Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers)Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20002578 .

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points raised above. It might not be inappropriate to conclude by offering some alterna

tive views on research and teaching-but without providing any supporting evidence

for them at this stage. These suggestions could well form part of a research agenda at a later stage.

First, it is a grey world; there is no simple relationship to be found-or to be expected between research and teaching. Secondly, engagement in research can be both helpful and detrimental to effective teaching. Thirdly, good teaching requires commitment to good teaching; good teaching should not necessarily be.expected to occur through commitment to other, non-teaching activities. Fourthly, good teaching can be found where research activity and a research ethos are completely absent. (Consider, for example, of the highly effective training provided by many commercial training departments and organisations). Fifthly, before we can disentangle the nature of the relationship between teaching and research, we must first be clear as to what we mean when we use the words ' teaching ' and ' research '.

Finally, the task of establishing the links between research and teaching is likely to be rather more complex than just comparing two simple summary measurements. However, despite the technical difficulties that may be involved, a thorough-going study of the relationship between research and teaching is long overdue. Until it has been carried out, we will be little the wiser about the interactions that occur in our institutions of higher education whenever individuals practice the twin crafts of teaching and research.

References Dowell D A and Neal J A (1982) ' A selective review of the validity of student ratings of teaching ',Journal of

Higher Education 53, 5142. Knight P G (1987) ' The relationship between teaching and research ' Area 19, 350-2

Pearson K D (1987)' Teacher evaluation with multiple and variable lines of evidence ', American Educational

Research Journal 24, 311-7

Relationships between teaching and research? Michael Batty and Stephen A Matthews, Department of Town Planning, Univer

sity of Wales Institute of Science and Technology, Colum Drive, Cardiff CF1 3EU

An informed debate concerning the recent proposals by the University Grants Com mittee (UGC) and Advisory Board of Research Councils (ABRC), to divide the entire university system and departments therein into three tiers based on research and teaching, can only begin if we have sound empirical evidence that such a strategy will yield substantial benefits. Peter Knight (1987) throws considerable doubt on such proposals by demonstrating that, in one department, it is impossible to separate out good teachers from good researchers. Here we will report on our own analysis of similar assessments which show little or no correlation between the quality of teaching and research productivity but, like Knight, indicate similar difficulties involving the separation of good teachers from good researchers.

In UWIST, a rudimentary form of teaching assessment already exists on an annual basis in which senior staff in the department rank those staff eligible for promotion according to the 'quality' of their teaching. Research productivity and quality is judged externally in the process, but the research productivity of the department as a

whole is used to determine a proportion of the department's budget: this year this amounted to 30 per cent. A more formal method of teaching assessment was introduced

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for the first time at the end of the autumn term (1987), partly due to moves within the college to institute more formal assessment procedures and partly due to the vagaries of the existing system of' subjective 'assessment. All students were asked to assess lecture courses associated with a particular lecturer on five criteria: organisation, adminis tration, performance, seminar back-up and knowledge acquired. Five-point scales

were used for the assessment: for the first four criteria, the scale varied from 1 = ' dreadful ', 2 = ' poor ', 3 = ' average', 4= ' good ' to 5 = ' outstanding ', while for the fifth criterion, 'knowledge acquired', it varied from 1 =' nothing ' 2 =' not much ', 3 =' the usual', 4= ' quite a lot' to 5 =' a great deal '. Each student responded to the five questions/criteria for every lecture course attended, and special year meetings were convened by each year tutor to hold the assessment. The responses were anonymous and no members of staff were present while the questionnaires were completed. Students were also asked to make a more lengthy written evaluation of the lecture course along with the questionnaire, if they so wished.

The response rate by undergraduates following the BSc course was 90 per cent, while for those following postgraduate courses (Diploma and MSc) it was 60 per cent. 877 questionnaires were returned, and it was then decided to concentrate the analysis on the first three criteria involving the organisation, administration and performance of each lecturer. Seminar back-up only applied to about half the lectures, while ' knowl edge acquired' was a more difficult and open question to interpret. Thus the data set used involved responses to the first three questions made by students in each of the three BSc years, in each of the two Masters years, in the Diploma year, and in each of the two one-year specialist Masters courses. A typical response can be defined as Tsiry,

where s refers to a student in a particular year y of S(y) students, 1 refers to a particular lecturer from the group of L(y) lecturers teaching students in that year y, and r reflects one of the (R =3) questions responded to. Each response was coded from 1 to 5 according to its position on the five-point scale.

The data set produced can be cross-classified in several ways. What was required first was the overall (average) response T, associated with each lecturer 1. This average is calculated as:

Ti = syr Tslry/(Y S(y)R) (1) y scy y )

This average for each lecturer was across all years and all (three) criteria, but it was evident that there was considerable variation in the responses between student years. The year average can be calculated as:

TY -

sey r Ts1ry/(S(y)L(y)R) (2)

and this varies from 3 22 for the second BSc year to 4 11 for the one-year MSc in Transport. In general, the undergraduates were more critical of the lecturers and lecture courses than the postgraduates, possibly reflecting the fact that the under graduates were less cautious in their responses, that postgraduate teaching is on a more equal footing and/or that postgraduate courses contain more 'overseas' students who find it less easy to discriminate.

To resolve these differences, it is possible to construct various indices weighted by the absolute degree of variation. We have calculated a second index, T, weighted by the

mean Ty, in which the raw score Tslry is normalised as Tslry/Ty, and then substituted

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into equation (1). This index T, varies around a mean of 1. A more robust index than this weighted average would be an average weighted by the median and this index T1 can be computed from equation (1) using Tslry/Ty where Ty is the median response in each year of students. The ranking of lecturers' teaching quality with respect to these three indices is fairly similar, and thus the indices were used in providing advice to the senior staff in making the mandatory teaching assessment of staff eligible for promotion. But more important was the feedback to all staff who received the questionnaires relevant to their courses, as well as summaries of the overall analysis.

We measured research quality as productivity, counting publications in various ways over a four-year time period. We excluded citation analyses because of its bias towards learned journal-style publications and more established, older colleagues. We excluded research grants for similar reasons, as well as their rather lumpy nature over time which makes them a rather arbitrary measure. We thus based our assessment on those staff publications contained in the Head of Department's annual report to

Council which covers the UWIST financial year, August to July. The reports for four years from 1983/4 to 1986/7 were examined and all publications dated 1984 to 1987 counted. For three staff members, who had joined the department during this time, this information was extracted from their curriculum vitae. As two staff members did not teach during the period relating to the teaching assessment, they were excluded from the assessment of research. Only publications of three pages or more in length were counted, thus omitting book reviews, newspaper articles and such like, while mimeo graphed reports, internal papers and more fugitive publications had already been excluded from the annual report.

Eight different indices of research productivity for each lecturer were derived. First, publications were divided into two types reflecting the distinction between learned and more popular journals, books and reports. Second, journals and books were counted either directly as single contributions, regardless of their size, or by their number of pages. Third, the count was based on either each contribution being weighted equally regardless of how many authors were involved, or weighted fractionally if the paper was

multi-authored, the fraction being based on the number of authors. Two types of publication, two types of count-single contributions or by pages-and two methods of author accreditation produce eight varieties of index. In fact, with respect to type, more learned publications were counted separately from all publications, which provided the two categories.

Formally, for p = 1,2,.. . ., 8 possibilities, the index of research productivity R' for each lecturer is computed as:

RP =ERP (3)

where c is a particular contribution of the lecturer and Rp is either a fraction or 1, or a fraction of pages or a direct page count, depending upon the type p. The ranking of lecturers by productivity is very similar for all eight indices. The effect of different types is not significant, nor is the difference between single counts or pages. The effect of weighting author accreditation for multi-authored papers tends to cluster the data and pull in outliers.

We are now in a position to examine the relationships between each of the three teaching indices TI, T, or T' and the eight research indices R', p = 1,2,... ,8. Table 1 shows the pattern of correlation for these relationships. In all cases, positive corre lations are low and covariation is not significant. A small difference exists between the research indices involving page counts in comparison to single contribution counts, but

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in essence the correlation between teaching and research is close to zero everywhere. In Figure 1, we have graphed the scatter of points for the research scores {R } which are based on all contributions, weighted author accreditations and simple counts of contri butions, not pages, against the teaching index T, which is computed from the raw scores weighted by the year means. This seems to us to be the most appropriate of the indices to use. From the graph, it is clear that there is no way in which we can split good teachers from good researchers.

This discussion also highlights the difficulties posed by such a partial analysis of contributions to academic life. The most obvious cluster of lecturers in this analysis consists of good teachers who have modest or low levels of publication. However, amongst those lecturers, there are some who have made seminal contributions to research. There are also those who are active in consulting and other more practically based endeavours which do not lead to identifiable publications. And there are those who take an active part in the management of the department and the university. Although Knight (1987) has shown a stronger positive correlation between teaching and research than we have, neither of us has shown anything like the negative corre lation which could be used to break up departments and universities into teaching-only institutions.

Reference

Knight P G (1987) 'The Relationship between Teaching and Research' Area, 19, 350-2

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