A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States (with CD) (2011) / Chapter Skim
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3 Study Design
3 Study Design
Pages 27-48
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From page 27... ...
For doctoral education another administrative unit is of central importance: the graduate program. In most graduate schools the program admits doctoral students, works with the graduate school to fund them, designs their course of study and advisement, establishes the partnerships between mentoring faculty members and students that are the 27
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From page 28... ...
The increasingly interdisciplinary character of the biological and health sciences is both a cause and a consequence of these academic and institutional changes. Interdisciplinarity means that a plethora of faculty members from several disciplines and programs have multiple responsibilities for training graduate students and identify with several of the programs offered at the university.
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From page 29... ...
And it seems increasingly true that faculty sponsors of doctoral students have a greater influence on the next steps in their careers than the program faculty as a whole. Yet on balance the committee believes that the core educational experience of doctoral students takes place within a program that embraces both the course work that they experience with multiple members of the faculty and the concentrated research experience within the laboratory of one or several faculty members or in seminars or in individual discussion with faculty.
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From page 30... ...
research activity; (2) student support and outcomes, a measure that reflects program characteristics that are specifically relevant to the student experience; and (3)
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From page 31... ...
LSC could not be ranked because the subfields were too heterogeneous for raters to provide informed rankings across them, and no subfield was large enough that rankings could be calculated for it alone. Computer engineering was put forward as a field that was separate from electrical engineering, but the universities in the study reported only 20 computer engineering programs.
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From page 32... ...
In establishing the taxonomy of fields to be included in the current study, the committee used as a starting point Assessing Research-Doctorate Programs: A Methodology Study, the 2003 report of the Committee to Examine the Methodology for the Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs.2 On the one hand, it recognized that the taxonomy should build on previous taxonomies in order to maintain continuity with earlier studies, that it should correspond as much as possible to the actual programmatic organization of doctoral studies, and that it should capture the development of new and diversifying activities. On the other hand, it recognized that there was no "right" way of organizing academic fields.
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From page 33... ...
In the biomedical sciences in particular, newly developed programs offer students a common port of entry to a wide range of disciplines or, alternatively, degrees are offered in integrated programs without further differentiation. Programs draw on faculty from across the campus, making the assignment of faculty to programs more complex.
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From page 34... ...
Immunology and infectious disease Kinesiology Microbiology Nursing Public health Engineering Aerospace engineering Aerospace engineering Biomedical engineering Biomedical engineering and bioengineering Chemical engineering Chemical engineering Civil engineering Civil and environmental engineering Electrical engineering Electrical and computer engineering Materials science Materials science and engineering Mechanical engineering Mechanical engineering Industrial engineering Operations research, systems engineering, and industrial engineering Computer engineeringa Engineering science and materials (not elsewhere classified) b Broad Field 1993 2006 Physical and Astrophysics and astronomy Astrophysics and astronomy mathematical sciences Chemistry Chemistry Computer sciences Computer sciences Geosciences Earth sciences Mathematics Mathematics Oceanography Oceanography, atmospheric sciences, and meteorology Physics Physics Statistics and biostatistics Statistics and probability Applied mathematics Social and Anthropology Anthropology behavioral sciences Economics Economics Geography Geography Political science Political science Psychology Psychology Sociology Sociology Agricultural and resource economics Communication Linguistics (moved from humanities)
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From page 35... ...
a Computer engineering was not ranked because relatively few universities provided data about computer engineering as a field distinct from electrical and computer engineering. b Engineering science and materials (not elsewhere classified)
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From page 36... ...
The biological and health sciences taxonomy recognizes this fact and provides for the inclusion of such programs among the basic biological research doctorate programs. It also recognizes the maturation of several interdisciplinary programs, such as neuroscience, into established independent fields.
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From page 37... ...
In many institutions emeritus faculty play an important role in teaching and research, as do adjunct faculty. For this study the committee chose to define faculty as those who had directed doctoral research dissertations within the last five years.
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From page 38... ...
Some data, such as publications in the scholarly literature and citation indices, can be obtained from commercial databases, and information about federal grants is available as well. By contrast, institutional data such as time to degree, levels of student support, and infrastructure investment are not uniform and not always available or as easily compared.
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From page 39... ...
. R Rankings J: R Rankings: 5th Percentile 5th percentile value of the program's R ranking K: R Rankings: 95th Percentile 95th percentile value of the program's R ranking S Rankings L: S Rankings: 5th Percentile 5th percentile value of the program's S ranking M: S Rankings: 95th Percentile 95th percentile value of the program's S ranking Dimensional Rankings N: Research Activity: 5th 5th percentile value of the program's Percentile ranking for faculty research activity in 2006 O: Research Activity: 95th 95th percentile value of the program's Percentile ranking for faculty research activity in 2006 P: Student Support & Outcomes: 5th percentile value of the program's 5th Percentile ranking for student support and outcomes in 2006 Q: Student Support & Outcomes: 95th percentile value of the program's 95th Percentile ranking for student support and outcomes in 2006 R: Diversity: 5th Percentile 5th percentile value of the program's ranking for diversity in 2006 S: Diversity: 95th Percentile 95th percentile value of the program's ranking for diversity in 2006 Data: Research T: Average Number of This variable is the total over seven Activity Publications (2000-2006)
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From page 40... ...
Data: Student Support X: Percent of First Year Students For each program, question E5 & Outcomes with Full Financial Support, Fall reported the number of full-time first 2005 year graduate students who received full financial support during the fall 2005 term. This number was divided by the total number of full-time, first year doctoral students enrolled fall
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From page 41... ...
To compute the completion rate, the number of doctoral students for a given entering cohort who completed their doctorate in 3 years or less and in their 4th, 5th, 6th years were totaled and the total was divided by the entering students in that cohort. This computation was made for each cohort that entered from 1996-1997 to 1998 1999 for the humanities and 1996-1997 to 2000-2001 for the other fields.
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From page 42... ...
Data: Diversity AC: Non-Asian Minority Faculty For each program the data reported for as a Percent of Total Core and question B7, the race/ethnicity of core New Faculty, 2006 and new faculty in the program, was used to compute the ratio of non Hispanic Blacks, Hispanic, and American Indians or Alaska Natives to that of all faculty with known race/ethnicity. "Core" faculty are those whose primary appointment is in the doctoral program.
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From page 43... ...
the institution provided health care (1=Yes; 0=No) insurance for its graduate students.
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From page 44... ...
For more detail on how these data were calculated, refer to footnote 46 in A Data-Based Assessment of Research-Doctorate Programs in the United States (2010) , Chapter 3, "Study Design." AQ: Assistant Professors as a Of those faculty who reported any Percent of Total Faculty, 2006 rank, the percentage of assistant faculty were calculated as the number of assistant professors divided by the number of total faculty.
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From page 45... ...
Responses at the institutional and program levels relied heavily on the institutional coordinator at each institution, who, depending on the administrative structure of the university, was either the graduate dean or the director of institutional research. This person knew how to find data about doctoral programs and made sure that the questionnaires were answered by knowledgeable respondents.
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From page 46... ...
Aside from external checks with the institutions, NRC staff and the committee performed repeated ongoing internal checks on the data. These checks included looking at grants, awards and honors, GRE scores, completion rates, and the like.
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From page 47... ...
In the future it might be possible to obtain data on these kinds of publication from résumés, but that is expensive and time consuming. 5 The computer sciences count as publications articles that are presented at refereed conferences, but until recently few of these papers were indexed by Thomson Reuters.
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