Schutz, Drake & Lessner (2013) explore a question that few others have attempted to answer in previous studies.\u00a0 The researchers focused their research on academic rigor and grade inflation as they relate to the differences between full-time and adjunct faculty.\u00a0 A handful of studies have shown that full-time faculty assign lower grades than adjunct faculty however, there has been little research into whether adjunct faculty are less rigorous in their grading practices.\u00a0 The phenomenon of grade inflation is of concern to the higher education community and is the focus of numerous studies.\u00a0 These studies cannot differentiate the contributing factors, increased student mastery of learning or leniency as a measure of rigor, to significantly higher percentages of \u201cA\u2019s\u201d in the past 50 years and the substantially lower percentage of \u201cD\u201d and \u201cF\u201d grades.<\/p>\n
Research question:\u00a0 This study asks if there is a \u201cdifference between community college full-time and adjunct faculties\u2019 own perceptions of rigor as an influencing factor in their grade assignment\u201d (Schutz, Drake & Lessner, 2013, p. 61).\u00a0 The researchers go on to question perceptions of rigor and the grading during the course, when assigning the final grade and what the student actually earned.<\/p>\n
Methodology: The study collected and examined data from 1,559 full-time and adjunct faculty from Midwest community colleges.\u00a0 The data collection instrument passed two institutional review boards and met reliability and validity standards.\u00a0 The instrument was then field and pilot tested for analysis error.\u00a0 The survey had an impressive 22% return rate and invited faculty represented the full-time and adjunct populations of the institutions surveyed.\u00a0 Several data collection and analysis tools were utilized.\u00a0 After a data quality and validation checklist was applied no issues arose to invalidate the responses.\u00a0 The survey distributed was as 3-point Likert-type scale.\u00a0 The study utilized multiple dependent variables.\u00a0 Therefore, multivariate analysis of variance was conducted prior to conducting individual analysis of variance.\u00a0 The ANOVA tested \u201cfor the explanatory variable, faculty group, on each of the dependent variable\u201d (Schutz, Drake & Lessner, 2013, p. 65).\u00a0 The researchers also checked for internal consistency for rigor questions which was verified with a moderately strong Pearson r coefficients of correlation between two questions.<\/p>\n
Results:\u00a0 Validity was once again established by contrasting group analysis in the results and the correlations among the responses was consistently high.\u00a0 There is significant faith in the results with two limitations.\u00a0 The first limitation is that there is no evidence that faculties\u2019 perception of rigor influences grades and the study was not tied to outcome data such as actual grades or artifact analysis.\u00a0 The other limitation is the demographic makeup of the sample size combined with regional, cultural differences.\u00a0 Although the sample size was large enough to generalize to the faculty populations who serve within the institution population drawn from; respondent demographics are not representative of all other American community colleges.\u00a0 The sample was 90% European American, 6% African American, 1% Asian, 2% Hispanic, and 1% other.<\/p>\n
Commentary:\u00a0 This question becomes more important as the ratio of full-time to adjunct faculty changes.\u00a0 Students benefit in a myriad of ways from academic rigor and receiving a grade that accurately reflects their mastery of a subject.\u00a0 If grades are inflated by adjunct faculty at community colleges and more sections are taught by adjuncts the problem of grade inflation is compounded.\u00a0 Additional research to explore the connection between perceived, or stated rigor, and standardized rigor could add valuable evidence to this area of study.\u00a0 Adjunct faculty spend little time interacting with colleagues to compare classroom practices, rigor and grading policies.\u00a0 Also, lack of standardized departmental policy and communication of departmental policy regarding grading is an area to research to determine the influence on classroom practice by both full-time and adjunct faculty. \u00a0An interesting research question is: what is the academic rigor expectation from long-term vs. short-term adjuncts? \u00a0Long-term vs. new full-time faculty? \u00a0What about adjuncts who actively participate in departmental decisions and culture?<\/p>\n
Thoughts from a casual observer of faculty “From the Reference Desk<\/em>.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Schutz, K. R., Drake, B. M., & Lessner, J. (2013). Do community college full-time and adjunct faculties differ in their perceptions of rigor in assigning grades? American Journal of Educational Studies<\/em>, 6<\/em>(2), 59-77.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Schutz, Drake & Lessner (2013) explore a question that few others have attempted to answer in previous studies.\u00a0 The researchers focused their research on academic rigor and grade inflation as they relate to the differences between full-time and adjunct faculty.\u00a0 A handful of studies have shown that full-time faculty assign lower grades than adjunct facultyContinue reading<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[6,4,5,8,7],"class_list":["post-21","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-faculty-behavior","tag-academic-rigor","tag-adjuncts","tag-community-college","tag-full-time-faculty","tag-grade-inflation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions\/23"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/roscelloassociates.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}