Doing Science
Doing Science with Undergraduates at a Liberal Arts College (LAC)
Ruth L. Ault
Davidson College
Panel discussion, Perspectives on the Future of the Academy at the APA Science
Leadership Conference, Washington DC. December 2, 2006
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Doing Science
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Doing Science with Undergraduates at a Liberal Arts College (LAC)
I appreciate the opportunity to reflect on how my colleagues and I have been able to
conduct scientifically sound research while working at an undergraduate liberal arts
college whose main mission has historically been couched in terms of teaching. To adopt
the term that my colleague, Julio Ramirez, coined, our mission has become “Terching.”
This term indicates that teaching and research can be inseparable aspects of one activity.
What I hope to convince you of are the following 3 points and then I will make 3
recommendations:
POINTS:
1.Getting a job at a good liberal arts college is not the kiss of death for a scientific career.
2. By terching, that is, by integrating teaching with research, both can be done well; it’s
not a zero-sum game in which research and teaching are opposing forces.
3. Undergraduates who have participated in real scientific research, who have
experienced terching, make fine graduate students and go on to advance science in their
own right.
RECOMMENDATIONS:
(a) If you are at a university with a graduate program, don’t discourage your doctoral
students from choosing a career at a liberal arts college. Rather help them prepare for it.
This can involve both selecting particular research areas that are more likely to allow
undergraduates to join in the enterprise and teaching the graduate students to become
good terchers.
(b) No matter where you are, look for ways to bring more terching into your departments.
(c) If you sit on a funding panel, don’t dismiss proposals out-of-hand from small college
faculty. They may indeed have the necessary resources, both physical and human, to do
the research they are proposing in their grant application.
All of my colleagues at Davidson believe in these points and recommendations, but I
am particularly indebted to Julio Ramirez for some of my remarks. He previous
articulated some of these ideas, which I have borrowed freely.
Point 1: LAC Job ≠ death of scientific career
One has only to examine the CVs of faculty at LACs, particularly those hired within the
past 20 years, to know that the face of college education has changed dramatically.
Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, colleges steadily ratcheted up their standards for
faculty to get tenured and promoted. They began calling for active research programs and
providing newly hired faculty with start-up funds, laboratories, and pre-tenure sabbaticals
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to make sure that research got done. For example, when I was hired at Davidson in 1979,
I was unsuccessful in negotiating for an electric typewriter instead of the manual one that
was standard office equipment, despite my rationale that I had already published two
books and would begin immediately working on the second edition of one of them. That
was the sole piece of equipment I asked for to support my scholarly activity. By 1986
when we hired our first neuroscientist, and in our subsequent hires of faculty who study
perception, cognitive aging, psychopharmacology, and I/O psychology, the VPAA’s
office has provided each new hire with up to $40,000 over two years in start-up funds as
well as individual laboratory space for each, with the concomitant expectation that they
will have active research programs, publish in top-flight scientific journals, and where
appropriate, seek external funding to continue to support their research.
Two of my colleagues have successfully won multiple grants, from NIMH, NIDA, NSF,
and HHMI. One is able to hire a full time technician/lab manager, usually a recent
graduate from his own lab who stays on a year to do this work. Both faculty use current
juniors and seniors as junior colleagues, conducting research, presenting conference
posters, and publishing jointly. With our generous sabbatical plan, one spent a year as a
visiting research scholar at a neighboring university. My other Davidson colleagues have
selected research areas that need minimal equipment (mostly computers and some
specialized software) and collaborate with colleagues at other institutions to provide
larger subject pools, specialized equipment, or just the intellectual stimulation that
promotes doing good science. Interdepartmental cooperation on campus, too, has enabled
Psychology to share with Biology a full-time animal care technician. With Biology,
Chemistry, and Physics, we share an instrumentation specialist who fixes all kinds of
expensive equipment cheaply. And with those departments plus mathematics, we have
some computer gurus dedicated to keeping the sciences’ laboratory computers running
smoothly. Our neuroscientist regularly gives tours to alumni who are medical doctors, all
of whom say that his laboratory is better equipped than what they had access to in
medical school.
Point 2: Terching can be done well.
Early on, one of the obstacles to doing research at a LAC was the attitude of our own
colleagues and administrators who feared that a faculty member’s research would
undermine the educational experience of undergraduate students. But we have now
convinced them that teaching and research can be linked vocations, each informing and
energizing the other. This dynamic exchange enables professors to more readily inspire,
encourage, and empower their students, which is the essence of teaching. Maintaining an
active research program grounds faculty in the passion of inquiry and impels them to
remain current in scientific research. Teachers who aren’t actively engaged in research
can most certainly be passionate about what they teach. Likewise, they are most certainly
capable of remaining current, but having research questions constantly bubbling in their
minds models for students what drives the acquisition of new knowledge. It invites them
to share in the process. It makes “active learning” and “critical thinking” more than just
the buzz word of the hour.
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On the flip side, teaching can energize research activity by keeping faculty engaged with
lively and enthusiastic students, who passionately throw themselves at fundamental
questions in psychological science. Their excitement is infectious and stimulates research
discussions. Students have raised questions and provided insights in class or in the lab
that have triggered additional avenues for faculty pursuit. Thus, teaching itself has
provided a forum from which to generate interesting research questions.
Ultimately, the selling point for terching is recognizing that we could not expect
undergraduate psychology students to want to become scientists without ever having
conducted original scientific research. The development of intellectual skills required to
conduct scientific research will only enhance the educational experience of undergraduate
psychology students and will ultimately best serve the needs of the profession and of the
Nation.
Point 3: Undergraduates become graduate students.
The more that undergraduates engage in real scientific research, the more skilled they are
when they enter graduate school and the faster they become fully independent
contributors to the scientific enterprise. Davidson and other prestigious LACs send on to
graduate school some very well trained students. Our graduates already understand how
library research is integral to the research process, so they do thorough literature searches
and appreciate the difference between peer-reviewed journals and popular press accounts
of science. They understand how to design unconfounded experiments and statistically
analyze their results. They have prepared IRB proposals or Animal Use protocols. They
have called parents and visited daycare centers to solicit child participants or they visited
retirement communities to solicit older adult participants. They have spent semesters
designing perceptual stimuli or developing parent questionnaires about media violence.
They have coded observation videotapes of autistic children or of interns taking medical
histories from their patients. They have evaluated management training programs or
conducted surveys of customer satisfaction. They have lesioned rats’ brains to study
neuronal regeneration or measured motor impairment in rats drugged with different
substances. They have experienced standing next to their research poster at local,
regional, and national conferences—explaining what they studied and describing their
plan to pursue the new lines of inquiry that their research revealed to them. Over the past
5 years my 8 dept colleagues and I have 26 publications with 48 different student
coauthors, and we’ve made 57 conference presentations with 82 different students. And
all of this is just at my one College. Faculty at other LACs can cite similar statistics.
From the students’ perspective, we teach them how to do science in two ways: We
require them to take one statistics course and three research methods courses from a
choice of 11 different fields within psychology, and we invite them, individually, to join
us in our labs. From the faculty’s perspective, we teach them to do science by
collaborating with them and with each other, and by introducing some aspects of research
at every level of our teaching. We especially design our research methods courses to be
an integral part of our own research endeavors.
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We certainly do not have the luxury of having students in our lab for 5 or 6 or 7 years, as
graduate school faculty do, but the sophomore who conducts three behavior observations
at a local daycare center for a survey child development course, becomes the junior who
runs two children for a group research project she helped design. She becomes the senior
who creates novel point-light displays in the perception lab to explore the idea, for her
senior thesis, that preschoolers’ visual perspective for these displays is skewed, relative to
adults, due to their angle of view. She then becomes the presenter of her thesis at EPA or
SEPA and her work adds to the on-going perception research of her thesis advisor.
I could go on for hours with examples from my colleagues’ research programs, but
instead let me turn to my recommendations.
Recommendation 1: Encourage and prepare some of your graduate students for liberal
arts teaching careers.
Teaching at a LAC is not for everyone, but it’s also not a booby prize. Those whose
interests and talents include teaching undergraduates and whose research does not require
elaborate or expensive technology, or who are good team players and have established
networks of colleagues who do have access to such equipment, can enjoy fine scientific
careers in the context of undergraduate teaching. We find very often that students who
themselves graduated from a liberal arts college are more interested in returning to a likeminded institution. Among my colleagues at Davidson, our undergraduate institutions
included Pomona, Gustavus Adolphus, Lenoir-Rhyne, Davidson, and Gettysburg
Colleges, and a university on the small-enrollment side, Fairfield University. But to be
immediately successful at such a job, the graduate students need some valid teaching
experiences that are well supervised. I hope that more and more graduate schools will
adopt serious teacher-in-training programs and do more than throw hapless graduate
student TAs at large-section Psy 101 courses.
Recommendation 2: Bring more terching to your own institution.
Luckily there are now multiple models of how to engage undergraduates in learning
research. For a look at “best practices” and a wide variety of examples, I shamelessly
promote an edited book by Dana Dunn, Randy Smith, and Barney Beins that arose from a
conference on teaching statistics and research methods. The conference was underwritten
by Division 2 of APA, the Society for the Teaching of Psychology, and the book will be
available any day now from Erlbaum. If you want more specific information about the
variety of research methods courses that we teach at Davidson, my colleagues and I have
a chapter in that book.
Ault, R. L., Munger, M. P., Tonidandel, S., Barton, C., & Multhaup, K. S. (in press).
Hands-on labs in content area methods courses. In D. S. Dunn, R. A. Smith, & B.
Beins (Eds.), Best practices for teaching statistics and research methods in the
behavioral science (pp. 125-142). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Recommendation 3: Fund research done at liberal arts colleges.
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One of the obstacles my neuroscience colleagues in particular have faced is the
skepticism at granting agencies that good research can be done at LACs. The skepticism
is fueled in part by the prejudices and ideas formed when you, who are panelists and
reviewers, were yourselves being trained for your scientific careers. My message is that
the world has changed. Many LACs have figured out that teaching and research are not
mutually exclusive, and they are providing the kind of infrastructure that enables their
faculty to do meaningful science. Of course it’s appropriate to ask grant writers some
hard questions concerning facilities and time and staff support to conduct the research
they are proposing. One of the ways we make time for research is by getting creative with
our teaching loads. At Davidson, for example, we have a 5-course a year teaching load,
but we get two course credits for teaching one section of our research methods course,
with 15-20 students, effectively reducing our load to 2-2. If students in the methods
classes are conducting research in the faculty member’s lab, then we’re being paid to do
our research just as surely as we’re being paid to teach our students. As I mentioned
earlier, we now have start-up funds, laboratory spaces, and support personnel, so faculty
at LACs can and should be doing the research they propose in their grant applications,
but it takes your engagement as well, to recommend funding for these projects.
I hope that I have been making the point that you all already knew, that teaching at a
LAC is not only compatible with a productive scientific career, it can be integral to it.
Moreover, it has the added advantage of initiating the training of the next wave of
psychological scientists, because if students are not turned on to science by the end of
their college experience, they aren’t going to apply to graduate schools. Therefore, steer
your best and brightest doctoral students toward the new career of terching.