Proposal to Increase Laboratory Workload Credit
School of Science
November 21, 2014
Introduction
The School of Science Chairs and Program Directors in consultation with the Dean, Roy Wensley, propose that the workload credit for teaching laboratory sections be increased from 0.5 to 0.67 courses. This falls short of the ideal, which would account for each hour in a laboratory class as equivalent to an hour in a lecture class. However, if the College were to move from our current practice of weighting labs as 0.5 courses to 1.0 (i.e. a one hour of contact time = one hour of workload), this would result in the need for about 11 new FTE faculty[1]. Because of the office space and budget implications, at this time we are only proposing a move in the direction of the ideal. Given the current number of lab sections taught, the increase of weighting from 0.5 to 0.67 will require approximately 3.0 FTE faculty.
Two fundamental propositions of this proposal are: 1. The laboratory requirements included in the curricula of lab-based disciplines in the School of Science are necessary as part of a quality education for majors in scientific disciplines, and 2. The reduced weighting of workload hours for laboratory instruction does not compensate faculty teaching laboratories appropriately, by failing to recognize the amount of time they spend in class and lab relative to other faculty at Saint Mary’s. Given these two propositions, the unrecognized workload of laboratory teaching reduces faculty time for non-teaching responsibilities (e.g. scholarship) and impacts the quality of the laboratory experience for our students.
In moving toward a more equitable workload accounting for laboratory teaching, faculty in laboratory-heavy disciplines will be able to devote more time to collaboration with individual students and their own scholarship.
Laboratory Courses in the Curriculum
The science curriculum at Saint Mary’s is recognized for its commitment to a rich laboratory experience for our science majors. Anecdotally, our students report to us that their experience in our lab courses has prepared them better than their peers in industry and graduate school.
Science is an empirical discipline and as such, students must study the theoretical and the experimental side-by-side. There are learning outcomes in laboratory courses that cannot be realized in lecture-only formats. In lab, students engage in: the empirical process of science;reinforce physical conceptsthrough manipulation of physical objects, which greatly enhances their understanding of the science they study in lecture; and learn to use specific, complex instrumentation they will see when employed or when they attend graduate school.
The importance of laboratory work in a science curriculum is recognized by national organizations. The American Chemical Society (ACS) states that
“[t]he certified major must have 400 hours of laboratory experience beyond the introductory chemistry laboratory…Students should understand the operation and theory of modern instruments and use them to solve chemical problems as part of their laboratory experience.”[2]
In their guidelines for undergraduate biology programs, The National Association of Biology Teachers states the following:
Students graduating with a bachelor’s degree in biology are required to have
taken: … one half of the credits required for the major in courses in which there is an associated laboratory component. This laboratory component shouldaccount for at least one third of the course and include hands-onexperimentation. Computer simulations should not replace the laboratory…The curriculum should be developed so that the nature of science is stressed and the investigative nature of science is infused throughout the curriculum.[3]
Our programs are in line with these quantitative laboratory requirements.
Laboratories and Workload
It has been a longstanding practice of Saint Mary’s College to value lab instruction less than lecture instruction in accounting for faculty workload. This means many faculty in the School of Science are in class significantly more minutes during the week than the typical faculty member at Saint Mary’s even though they are given the same workload credit (6 courses/year).In teaching 3 lecture courses in a term, for a standard lecture course (3 days/week), the typical faculty member is in class 585 minutes (9.75 hours) per week. Faculty members in the School of Science who teach in disciplines with lab courses are in class an average of 740 minutes (12.3 hours)[4]. So, on average faculty teaching labs are in class 27% more than most undergraduate faculty members. The maximum number of minutes for an individual faculty member in the 2013-14 academic year was 980, which means the amount of time in class for a lab instructor can be as great as 68% more than a typical faculty member.
Faculty who teach introductory and upper division labs understand the intensity of teaching a laboratory. At times it the most mentally draining work they do—moving from group to group, or individual to individual, answering the same question multiple times, as each group or individual student gets to a particular realization point in an experiment in their own time. In addition, regularly offering advice to improve student technique and monitoring the lab for safety require vigilance. In many laboratory courses, faculty also must test and troubleshoot various scientific instruments and equipmentto insure an effective experience for the students. Evaluating student work in a lab course, by reading lab notebooks and reports, grading quizzes and exams, and other means, is no less demanding than for a lecture course. Both the extra time in class and the taxing nature of laboratory instruction greatly reduce a faculty member’s ability to engage in other crucial activities, such as scholarship, student advising, research collaboration with students, and committee service.
The efficacy of lab instruction is affected by discounting the workload credit that faculty are given for teaching lab courses. “Just as logistical preparation for a science laboratory exercise must be done every time that lab is conducted, unlike lectures that can be prepared once but repeated often, it is a recognized fact that active-learning instruction often requires more time and preparation that does more traditional methods of instruction (Bonwell, 1991, Lamb, 1997, McKinney, 2008).”[5]
There is also evidence that using weighted loading for laboratory instruction leads to a less effective laboratory learning experience for students because faculty members have less time to prepare than faculty teaching a lecture.[6] “The inescapable conclusion is that loading labs for less credit than traditional lectures is counter productive and inconsistent with current learning theory, in which active learning environments are more effective than passive lectures in teaching the conceptual reasoning required to raise the scientific literacy level of our student population.”[7]
National organizations recognize the need for equitable workloads of faculty members in the laboratory sciences. The American Physical Society (APS) and American Chemical Society (ACS) recognize this in their statements about teaching science laboratories. The ACS Guidelines for Chemistry in Two-year College Programs, states, “When determining faculty teaching assignments, each laboratory contact hour should be equivalent to a classroom contact hour.” Likewise in the The American Association of Physics Teachers Guidelines for Two-Year College Physics Programsis written, “[i]n computing physics faculty workload, one hour of laboratory supervision should be considered to be at least equivalent to one hour of lecture responsibility.” While these are for two-year institutions, the teaching workload computation for faculty in an undergraduate four-year program should be the same.
External Benchmarks
Nationally, the standards of workload computation for laboratory instruction[8] have been a topic of discussion for a long time. While statements from national organizations make clear that laboratory contact time should be counted as equal to lecture contact time (see AAPT and ACS statements above), there is no clear national standard applied in practice5—see the article “Do Science Professors Get Enough Credit?”[9]in Appendix A.
We have collected the weighting practices for laboratory teaching at some other institutions. The results are in Appendix B. While not a pure statistical sampling—we had to use institutions for which the information was easily available—the pattern is clear. There are three common weightings: 0.5, 0.67, and 1.0.
Proposed Workload Credits
In order to move in the direction of appropriate workload recognition for laboratory instruction, the following workloads are proposed:
NewOld
4 day/week lecture1.331.5
1 Laboratory Section0.670.5
Laboratory Coordinator[10]0.670.5
The 4 day/week lecture credit is commensurate with the rest of campus.
Models of individual faculty workloads using the new formulae are presented in Appendix D. Because of the 2/3 workload credit for lab teaching, it will not be possible to construct a teaching schedule with a 6.0 course load for each individual faculty member in a given year. To facilitate the accounting for workload the following methods are proposed:
- Use the two-year accounting protocol.
- Allow faculty in SOS to teach a section of FYAC and use the 1/3 credit in that year to balance their load.
- For single years with an overload pay a faculty member the overload rate (i.e. $8000/course).
Staffing Requirements
Using the number of courses and laboratories offered in the past two years and the new .67weighting for lab teaching[11], new ranked faculty FTE needs by departmentnecessary for this proposal are:
Biology1.4
Chemistry0.6
Physics0.5
Psychology0.2
We propose to transition into the new workload model over the next two years. The financial implications of funding the minimum needs dictated by the proposal is the cost of approximately 3 FTE faculty. During the transition, the new workloads can be implemented using lecturers, and paying faculty overloads.
The long-term goals of the departments can also be enhanced by creating 3 new tenure-track lines in the Biology, Chemistry, and Physics and Astronomy Departments. A full position is more than is needed for Chemistry and Physics. However, the addition of a full position is needed for two purposes. In the Department of Chemistry, a full-time faculty member will transition to phased retirement at the end of this year. A full position in Chemistry will meet the needs of the lab credit proposal and cover the reduced load of the faculty member on phased retirement. This will help us meet the goal of more ranked instruction in the department and allow continued, and hopefully growing, participation in Collegiate Seminar. The new position in Physics will cover the lab credit proposal needs in that department and allow the department to increase its participation in Collegiate Seminar—a goal the department has had for a few years, and which is in line with the recent program review. The future of the complete staffing for Biology and Psychology should be revisited after two years, when the new workload accounting has been fully implemented.
Appendix A
CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION ARTICLE
(December 4, 2002)
DO SCIENCE PROFESSORS GET ENOUGH CREDIT?
By JENNIFER JACOBSON
As an associate professor of biology, Paul A. Porneluzi wants to get credit for every hour he spends in the classroom at Central Methodist College. And he does, if he's teaching a traditional lecture course, but not if he's teaching a laboratory session.
When his college calculates his teaching load it gives him full credit for the lecture courses, but only half credit for the laboratory courses.
This academic year, Central Methodist is reviewing how it defines faculty workload issues, and Mr. Porneluzi wants his college to give credit where credit is due: His two-hour lab course should count as two hours in the classroom. "It's every bit as intense as a traditional classroom lecture course," he says. "You're constantly walking around the room answering questions and trying to create a situation in the lab where students can observe things and start thinking about things."
But he's fighting an uphill battle. Traditionally, most colleges have awarded science professors only partial credit for teaching labs. And perennial lobbying by science professors hasn't changed that. Lab courses continue to be viewed on many campuses as less than rigorous, easier for professors to teach and easier on students.
While those outside the sciences may imagine labs in which science professors sit with their feet up on their desks reading the newspaper while students follow a recipe-like experiment, science professors say that's hardly the case. Preparing a good lab course takes time, they say, and showing students what they should be observing, as well as answering their myriad questions, takes considerable energy.
Take Mr. Porneluzi. This fall, he is teaching two lecture sections of general biology at Central Methodist and six lab sections. Enrollment in the labs is usually capped at 22 to 27 students. He has an undergraduate student assigned to him through the work-study program who assists with some of the setup and cleanup of the labs. Even with the student's help, Mr. Porneluzi says he often spends three or four hours of his own time each week preparing the labs.
He thinks the reputation of lab courses as easy to teach may have grown out of the tradition at research universities of having graduate students teach the labs, rather than faculty members. And while some poorly designed labs are gut courses, he says, so are some traditional lecture courses.
"Good lab teaching," Mr. Porneluzi says, "is not sitting there in front of specimens but creating hands-on activities and helping students interpret them."
Mr. Porneluzi hopes that humanities professors at the college will support a credit increase for their science peers. "We have very strict controls on class size for writing courses -- no more than 15 students in some," he says. "I suppose this is so English faculty can do a good job of teaching students how to write. I'd like to see a policy in the science department so we can do as best a job as possible in teaching labs by making the workload more equitable."
Roger Kugler, vice president and dean of the college, says it is currently reviewing workloads for all courses and departments. He predicts that the college will increase the credit professors receive for teaching labs, though only to 0.66 of an hour's credit for every hour of lab.
"There is a need for some compromise if it's affordable," he says. "That's where we're headed."
Mr. Kugler says there's no uniformity among colleges assigningcredit for labs since institutions vary by enrollment and budget; some can afford to offer full credit and others can't. To afford giving full credit at Central Methodist, he says, the college would have to reduce the amount of "contact time" that faculty members must spend in the classroom, and he says the college won't do that. He says the college would also not consider such options as paying professors extra for teaching more than a full load, hiring adjuncts, or increasing enrollment in lab courses and decreasing the number offered.
For science professors at Widener University, it's not an issue. They receive one hour of credit for every hour they spend teaching a lab course. "It's been like that for the 27 years I've been here," says Lawrence W. Paneck, associate provost. "We have always traditionally felt that laboratory experience was just as important -- sometimes more difficult for faculty members to teach -- as lecture. So we have treated it the same way."
And so has Saint Cloud State University, although technically campus policy states that science professors receive only one credit hour for every two hours of lab they teach. "We've been pretty lucky within our college that the dean comes from the biology department and understands what lab is like, so we pretty much go on contact hours," says Patricia L. Hauslein, an associate professor of biology. That means every hour of a lab equals an hour of a faculty member's required teaching load.
This fall, Ms. Hauslein is teaching a section of a general biology course and a section of a four-hour lab that goes with it. The college, she says, has made a strong effort to make the labs "inquiry-based" as opposed to just having students fill out worksheets about the experiments they have done in
class.
"We think that lab experience is equally as important as lecture, and so we don't just shuttle students off to do cookbook kinds of lab experiments," she says. Instead, professors seek to engage students in critical thinking, which is a lot more work for everyone involved. The more complicated the science, the more chemicals and materials and procedures that are needed to set up the lab, Ms. Hauslein says.
Teaching these courses has been even more of a challenge this year, she says, because budget cuts have left her department with no teaching assistants. "We usually have eight," Ms. Hauslein says. "So we're running labs with undergraduates as T.A.'s this semester." That means more work for the professors since undergraduates aren't as knowledgeable as graduate students.
In a well-designed lab course, she says, professors set up the experiment and guide students through it. Then, once it's over, she says, they must help students "understand what happened, write up sophisticated lab reports, and understand graphing statistics." She adds: "The payoff is obvious compared to cookbook labs because not only does the lab give them a good set of skills but the quality of their thinking is, by the end of the semester, dramatically different."