A Benchmark Study of Scholarship-Related Activities in Engineering Technology
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In the past, most Engineering Technology (ET) educators engaged only in teaching and consulting, with few participating in scholarly activities. However, in recent years, there has been a gradual shift, and scholarship is now required for promotion and tenure at many institutions with ET programs due to the evolving mission of these institutions. The three necessary ingredients for an activity to be classified as a scholarly activity are documentation, dissemination, and peer review of the activity. lit underscore the importance of the new focus on scholarship, the Engineering Technology Council (ETC) of ASEE states in its 2003-2006 Strategic Plan's Goal = 5, "The ETC will develop guidelines and promote appropriate scholarship for engineering technology educators." Further, Strategy 5C of Goal = 5 in the ETC Strategic Plan highlights the need to "benchmark activities related to scholarship within the ET community." In a recent paper, 1 the ETC Task Force on Scholarship developed guidelines for scholarship in ET and proposed a faculty workload model. In a more recent paper, several strategies were presented for enhancing the scholarly productivity of engineering technology educators, and it was recommended that a benchmark survey of FT faculty scholarship be carried out to help determine, among other things, the appropriate level of scholarship for ET educators. This paper presents the results of the Fall 2004 and Spring 2006 ET Faculty surveys and correlation studies between selected variables in the surveys, and assesses the meaning of these results. The results obtained from this study may provide institutions the benchmark data they need to objectively evaluate their ET faculty in the area of scholarship, and to set a reasonable level of expectation for the scholarly productivity of ET faculty.
