Teaching Performance and its Relationship to Research Performance - Lichtenstein Distinguished Lecture

Teaching Performance and its Relationship to Research Performance

How is teaching performance related to class size? Are teaching evaluations conducted by students good indicators of teaching performance? Are research-oriented faculty members better, or worse classroom teachers? Are teaching evaluations closely related to the grades given by the instructors? Is it preferable to have senior faculty, as opposed to junior faculty, as the primary instructors for classroom teaching? This study is based on the teaching and official research reports of 350 tenure-track faculty and 50 non-tenure track teaching staff at Texas A & M University's College of Engineering from 1999 through 2003. The student population involved in the study consisted of over 10,000 graduate and undergraduate students in 11 engineering departments representing each year for the 1999-2003 period. Prior to the official release of the report to the public, we are planning to address the academic community to outline some of the issues reviewed in the 120-page long report that might be of interest to both the teaching and research faculty.

Speaker: Dr. Way Kuo, University Distinguished Professor and Dean of Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Way Kuo received a B.S. degree in nuclear engineering from National Tsing-Hua University in Taiwan in 1972 and his Ph.D. degree in engineering from Kansas State University in 1980. Previously, he was head of the Department of Industrial Engineering at TAMU. He is widely recognized for his work on reliability of nano-electronics and for developing methods to reduce infant mortality. He is the co-author of five engineering texts and Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Reliability. He was elected to U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2000.

Hosts: Hojjat Adeli (phone: 614-292-7929)and Liang-Shih Fan (phone: 614-688-3262)