AGENDA ITEM: Session 2: Institutional Arrangements

DR. ZOLLMAN; Okay, I am in charge. Let me start with just a small apology that I hope doesn't actually happen. I have to leave my cell phone on because my wife is recovering from an accident. She is recovering very well or I wouldn't be here but unfortunately starting yesterday the Bank of America has tried to track down, starting tracking down the previous owner of this phone number and I have only gotten two calls this morning from them which I quickly hung up on but if my cell phone rings it is because I feel like I do have to leave it on.

PARTICIPANT: So, the quick answer is just pay it.

(Laughter.)

DR. ZOLLMAN; I haven't been told how much it is, but I now know his name.

Okay, this is the only session where we are actually going to have formal presentations. We have two of them basically focusing on jobs and careers. The presenters have been told they have 15 minutes each and I am very good at making sure that they don't take any longer. I have practiced that a lot over the years and I have even moved over here so I can stare them down if I need to.

So, Scott is first. So, why don't you just go ahead. Your title is up there.

DR. ASHMANN; Thank you for inviting me today. I hope that the findings that I am going to share are helpful to you as you continue on in this course of looking at education research in STEM disciplines.

The focus of this particular study was what the demand is for recent mathematics and science education PhDs. We, also, looked a little bit at the supply side as well with this study but Bob Glasgow will be looking more at the supply side in the next presentation. So, I am going to focus on the demand side instead and actually this study that I am going to report the findings on today was actually a part of a larger research project that took place at Michigan State University that was titled Developing Leadership for Mathematics and Science Education that Joan and Bob Floden and Jim Gallagher were the PIs on. I believe the funding came through in 1999 or 2000. It was about 5 years ago when funding came through from NSF to run this particular program.

Andy Anderson and Gail Burrell were other faculty members who worked on this project and then there were a whole host of graduate students in the PhD program in math or science education that worked on this as well and I was one of those individuals.

Just a note, you will find this PowerPoint slide in the folder that you received this morning. In the briefing book you found a presentation at the NARST conference, the National Association for Research in Science Teaching conference last year in Vancouver where I presented the data just on the science education job postings that were found in the year 2001-2002.

These findings will talk about both mathematics education and science education jobs. The larger research project had three main questions, the first being how did currently recognized leaders in mathematics and science education become leaders in that field and we did interviews with more than 60 individuals and I found in looking at the data from this particular part of our study and listening to the comments this morning there is some overlap. Many of these leaders talked about how this was an unplanned career trajectory on their part to get into science or mathematics education. It was not something that they went into this field planning to do .

They also talked about how important their initial teaching experience was. Many of them talked about being in a PhD program in chemistry for example and as a part of that program they taught a laboratory course or were a discussion leader in a discussion session or something like that and how important that initial teaching experience was and how that proved to be an impetus into their career in science education.

We, also, looked at how do current doctoral programs serve as preparation for leaders. We looked at 10 math education programs from around the country, 10 science education programs from around the country as well. That was our look at the supply side of the science education PhDs along with the math education PhDs.

It wasn't a complete look at the supply side since we only looked at 20 different programs. We ran into some issues of trying to decide what exactly the supply side looked like. If you look at the dissertation abstracts database for science education we found that that included many more studies, dissertation studies than what we would consider to be science education.

For example, it included studies from reading specialists where what they were looking at was something that specifically dealt with science but from the context of reading or from educational psychology; some educational psychologists were interested in what goes on in math or science classrooms and thus they considered themselves to be in the dissertation abstracts database. They checked the box that said that their study has something to do with science education or math education.

So, there was an overestimation of how many science and math educators there actually are. There was an underestimation from the data that we looked at from the National Research Council. Those data come primarily from the survey of current graduates and not everyone fills out that survey when they complete their PhD degree and so that was an underestimation.

So, we had some difficulty in actually looking at what the supply side is and I know that Bob will have some comments about that in hit part of the presentation, but what I want to focus on is the third part. Are the supply of and demand for doctoral graduates matched and what I looked at were job postings that were listed in the year 2001-2002, that academic year and the sources that I used, the Chronicle of Higher Education played a large role in identifying these job postings since it is the venue that is used by a number of universities to post positions. So, we looked at the paper copies. At that time the chronicle also was starting its web site where it was posting some other job postings as well. There was a good amount of overlap between the two, between the paper edition and the web site but not a complete overlap. So, we monitored both of those. The National Association for Research in Science Teaching has a listserve as does the Association for Educators and Teachers of Science. I am a member of both of those organizations and so I am on their listserve and collected those job postings that were listed there as well along with paper copies of job announcements that were mailed to members of both of those organizations and so I collected those, also.

So, those were the sources for the job postings that we found and we found exactly 600 job postings in mathematics education or science education for recent PhD graduates. Two hundred and forty-five were in math education and 168 in science education; 116 were looking for someone in elementary education but it would have some kind of emphasis in their work in their work or in their teaching on math and/or science education.

Sixty were listed as both science education and/or mathematics education and 11 were administrative.

DR.LEWIS: This is a 1-year sample?

DR. ASHMANN: Yes, it was for 1 academic year 2001-2002. The data from the job postings, 78 percent of the 600 postings were listed as tenure tract, about four out of every five in math education, science education, and elementary education. The number drops off for the administrative positions primarily because most of those were positions like maybe from a science museum where they were looking for someone with a background in science education but it would be more of an informal science education setting.

So, therefore it was not a tenure track position. Thirty-two percent of the 600 postings were housed in a college or department of natural or applied sciences or mathematics. So, this primarily is what we are talking about today, the STEM disciplines.

A little more than half of the positions were in a math department or a college of natural sciences that included a math department.

In science it was a little more than one-third were housed in a college of natural sciences.

The 32 percent is decreased. That number is decreased primarily because of the elementary postings and also the postings that were looking for someone in both science and mathematics.

So, it was very rare to find someone who would be in a college of natural sciences with an elementary education which is not so surprising.

Where these postings came from, 34 percent were posted by a research university. Almost half were at the master's level universities. Many of those positions were listed as we want someone who is going to be in the teacher preparation program part time and then part time in the chemistry department or biology department teaching some introductory level courses just like we have been talking about with the joint appointments.

The baccalaureate college percentage is rather low and I think that has something to do with the sources that we looked at instead of anything else. Many baccalaureate colleges probably do not both posting their positions in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Many of them are more regional postings or they might use other venue to post their positions instead of something that is more national in scope.

Many of the teaching research and service responsibilities that were listed in the job posting were not too remarkable. I think that they were looking to cast a wide net and so therefore you did not see responsibilities listed as we want someone to come in and do research on assessment or we want someone to come in and do research on effective teaching strategies but instead it would say something like we want someone to come in and do research appropriate to the field.

The terminology used was not real specific and the same thing with service. Many times we would see postings that used language such as service to the local community, service to the institution, service to the professional organizations. So, there again the language used was rather vague and I think because the institution wanted to cast a net quite widely to get an adequate pool of candidates.

However, 364 of the 600 postings listed other responsibilities and these included supervision of student teachers advising students using technology, writing grant proposals, in-service work with school and so almost half of these individuals would be expected to supervise student teachers in the field and thus when we get to the required qualifications K-12 teaching experience was quite common amongst the qualifications looked for in the job posting.

A PhD in mathematics education or science education is the top qualification because after all that is how this particular job posting was included in our database. We were looking for people who had recently, or looking for job postings that were looking for people who had recently earned their PhDs. We did not include job postings for deans or department chair people, people who have been in the field for a while. We were looking only for job postings where the PhD would have been a recent graduate and we also only looked at job postings in the United States. We did not consider job postings from other countries.

K-12 teaching experience, research project experience, demonstrated excellence in teaching experience and expertise with technology were the other most common required qualifications.

So, these job postings were from the 2001-2002 academic year. In fall of 2003 we sent an e-mail survey to a randomly selected sample of these 600 hiring committee chairpersons. So, if they hired someone this person would have finished their first year by the time the hiring department chairperson would have received our e-mail survey and so 123 surveys were sent. Fifty-six were returned, so a 46 percent response rate. The first question we asked and it was a rather short survey was the position filled, and 82 percent of the time the answer was yes.

We, also, asked how many applicants there were for each of these positions. The number of applicants for the positions ran from 2 to 60, with a mean of 16. So, by looking at just those two pieces of data we might conclude that everything is fine. We have most of the positions being filled and the number of applicants seems to be reasonable as well, but we asked a few more questions that made us not as comfortable as what we had hoped.

We asked about the match. What was the match between the required degree listed in the job posting and the degree that was held by the hired individual? So, these data represent just the 46 hired. A complete match was defined as the job posting said that we want someone with a PhD in science education and the person we hired has a PhD in science education, thus a complete match.

A partial match, an example of that would be we want a PhD in science education as listed in the job posting but the person we hired has a PhD in chemistry with some background in education. So, we considered that to be a partial match.

A poor match we considered an example we want a PhD in science education; however, the person we hired has a degree in educational psychology or educational administration. So, we considered those to be poor matches and so we had hoped obviously that the complete match percentage would be higher than 61 percent, but unfortunately it was not.

We, also, asked if the hired individual had a PhD at the time that they were hired and 33 percent of the time the PhD was not yet earned although many times it was in progress. It was a person who was finishing up their PhD studies probably in the dissertation phase.

A PhD more than 1 year ago provides a slight glimpse into how many people are changing jobs. They have a position at one university and now are going to switch to a different university and that happens 41 percent of the time.

Then our last question was how satisfied the hiring committee chairperson was with the qualifications of the five applicants and this was the most disturbing set of responses that we received. Only 20 percent considered themselves to be very satisfied with the top five applicants and about two-thirds of the respondents indicated that they were either somewhat satisfied or less than somewhat satisfied.

A few of these responses included short notes such as this question is difficult for me to answer because we did not have five applicants or something to that effect.

So, these last three questions I think shed some light on some of the issues in the field in terms of the match between the demand and the supply and then my final slide, the continuing research, we thought about writing a manuscript based on this research, these research findings but we thought well, somebody could easily say, “Well, maybe 2001-2002 was an anomaly. Maybe more times than not there are many more than 600 job postings in math and science education, and many times there are quite a bit fewer job postings."

So, we also collected job postings this past academic year, 2004-2005 and we are just starting to go through those job postings from the same five sources as what data were that were presented here and then next fall we will send an e-mail survey to randomly selected hiring committee chairpersons with the time lag being exactly the same as what it was for the 2001-2002 study. So, we will get another year's worth of data to compare, and that is all I have.

DR. ZOLLMAN; The way I would like to operate here is if anybody has a question just to clarify something that was said we should ask those now but any broader questions I want to wait until after both speakers.

Yes, Michael?

DR. WITTMANN: A clarification question, when you say science education do you also mean for example, in a physics department where they expected a PhD in physics would a complete match, would that have been when they expected a PhD physics with a focus on education research and that is what they were looking for?

DR. ASHMANN: Yes, as long as what they were looking for and the person that they hired had the same, the qualifications were the same and the degree was the same as what they were looking for in the job posting, yes, that was a complete match.

DR.IMBRIE: When we say math education, science education, a person being hired into this position, I still am confused as to whether the expectation is, I saw some of them, but they do research or that they are being just used for math education, science education as a way to pull that out as a person that we are going to look at; so, does it explicitly mean that these people are doing research?

DR. ASHMANN; No, it does not but because the positions that we pulled into our database from baccalaureate colleges in particular and some master's level colleges, the expectation for research was much less or not at all or non-existent compared to the research universities.

DR.BOYLAN: I was curious when you said that 160 of the positions explicitly listed advising students as a requirement. I guess I am surprised the other 400 plus didn't also list that as a requirement.

DR. ASHMANN: And that just might have meant that it was assumed that that would be a part of the position or for some other reason they did not decide to make that a part of the job announcement. Some of the job announcements were very scant as you can expect. It was two sentences literally and the trend is getting to be that there will be a two-sentence description or posting in the chronicle and one of the sentences says, "Go to our web site to get more information,” and so then of course we had to link to that and then there would be a full page explanation of the position.

DR. ZOLLMAN; I think we are going to have to go on.

PARTICIPANT: That is because the chronicle was so damned expensive.

DR. ASHMANN; Exactly.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Okay, Bob, why don't you go ahead?

DR. GLASGOW: Mine is focused completely on mathematics education and there are a couple of studies here actually that are part of what I have.

The first was by my doctoral adviser from the University of Missouri, Robert Reys and he has been looking at similar type of things to what Scott mentioned, the number of positions available and his search, I say, his search and a myriad of doctoral students who got to do this every day looked for openings in mathematics education, found in 2000-2001 to be 134 positions advertised for such graduates and he sent out a survey. Dr. Reys has a way of getting back a really high percentage of surveys. He got back 119 responses from those 134. Forty-nine percent were not filled which is significant and then the next year the same thing, 106 positions; 37 percent were not filled.

So, obviously it seems like there are either not enough graduates, candidates or not enough qualified candidates one or the other.

So, my study was actually a bigger study in terms of looking at the supply side and trying to track down who graduates of doctoral programs in mathematics really are. That is not as easy as it seems to be.

Mathematicians do a very good job of keeping track of their graduates but math educators it is a little more difficult.

So, these were the questions, just how many are there; what is their background; what kind of jobs do they take; what kind of activities and in particular scholarly activities we were looking at did they get involved in.

So, we started the same place that Scott did in terms of 838 dissertations from Dissertations Abstract and also we realized that many of these were not really doctorates in mathematics education.

What we did was just send out to every institution a person we knew who was a mathematics educator and said, “Was this person really a doctorate of mathematics education?" So, that took a little bit of time and a lot of phone calls and things but we identified 361 which means about 120. We were looking at a 3-year period. We picked this time period because we wanted to see what had happened to these people in that 5-to-7-year range in terms of pre-tenure status and so an average of about 120 per year. Now, if you remember the last slide 134 positions, 106 positions. So, it is pretty tight in terms of the number of graduates and the demand for those graduates.

The NRC data that was mentioned earlier underreports because not everybody fills it out the same way and not everybody fills it out.

So, NRC has reported an average of about 80 per year. Educational background, varied educational background before earning a doctorate in mathematics education but most have the equivalent of by the end of their program the equivalent a master's in mathematics.

The last one is pretty important in terms of what happens with the demand and supply thing and that is that 18 year difference between bachelor's and doctorate degree. That is a lot more than it would be if you looked at like a mathematician.

That means if you assume they graduate baccalaureate at 22 the average age is about 40. I didn't ask them their age because I was told that would decrease the number of responses I would get but it is probably around 40 years of age when they earn their doctorate in mathematics education which means mathematicians think you are pretty much over the hill by 40. They see it as a young person's field and in mathematics education actually the most prolific period is after that time in terms of research and so on.

Eighty percent of those took jobs at colleges and universities. Twenty percent if you remember that 120 number, 20 percent of those were going to not even go into higher education. They are going to go to K-12 as supervisors, curriculum supervisors and governmental, commercial, textbook companies or international institutions and the last one is even more telling.

One-third of all of them already have a job and they go back to their job. So, that takes off of that 120, 40 of those really never enter the job market.

This is the old classification of institutions of higher education but you can see that only about 38 percent, a little more than one-third go to places we would consider research oriented. So, you can see what is happening to the number of 120 going down tremendously in terms of research type positions.

The biggest majority go to master's level institutions and this just connects to the next one. Sixty percent go to departments of mathematics in colleges of arts and sciences.

Most of those are at that master's level. That is sort of the group sort of goes together. So, the biggest majority would go into those master's or below or in departments of mathematics. So, it doesn't mean there aren't others in research institutions but that is where most of those go.

So, if you look at the big picture here the big pie of the graduates of these kinds of doctoral programs half of them never really enter higher education job market because 30 percent of them are on leave and go back to where they were. Twenty percent go into other kinds of things and then of the other 50 percent only about 20 percent of those, only about 20 percent of the total pie go into research-type institutions.

So, you can see that if you go back and think of 134 positions there really are only about 60 out there every year or there were this time who were available for those 134 or 120 or however many positions there are.

I am going to not say much about this because I have a whole lot of stuff here but this is what they do. What they did was they responded to a survey but they also sent me their current vita and so I have vitae of all these people and I could go through and look to see what they say they have done in the 5-to-7-year period and you can see the average hours of teaching, 9-1/2 but if you look at those in terms of research versus master's obviously there is a huge difference there.

Publications, you can see there is a big difference there, too, 21 at research institutions and I actually went down and I classified every journal that they report. One of the things that happened we had a conference on doctoral programs in mathematics education in 1999 and we had some chairmen in math departments there who said, "We don't even know what good research is in mathematics education. What are the good journals? What should we be looking for?" and so we kind of looked there at what things people publish and where they publish.

Twenty-five percent of all the publications listed were conference proceedings. Twenty-two percent were in mathematics education journals. Those were the two biggest categories and 25 percent of all the publications listed on the vitae of these people were done prior to earning their doctorates usually while they were earning their doctorates.

Lots of presentations and involvement in quite a few funded projects, all the things that this side of the table has talked about in terms of being involved in teacher preparation and teaching, you know a lot of times teaching lower level classes, teaching classes for teachers and so on.

So, the shortfall of doctors in math education is a result of a lot of things. One is that 33 percent who never really enter the job market who are on leave from their institutions and already teaching and earn their doctorate and then go back.

At the time we did the study there was data that said that about 65 percent of all the current mathematics education faculty would retire within 3 years. I think some of those are still hanging on because they haven't all retired but a great number have. There was sort of this big group of people who were retiring and one of the interesting things is there are people in my study who I have studied as recent graduates of doctoral programs who have already retired because they earned their doctorate when they were 55 and so they are already retired by now.

There is not that big of a window if their average age is 40 when they take their doctorate degree. There does seem to be an increasing demand for doctorates in mathematics departments and part of my study was to follow up with interviews of people and that was one of the things that I looked at was what are your responsibilities and how does it fit what you thought it would be and so on and a lot of things we talked about today, but this idea of people working in mathematics departments, the biggest majority of graduates go to mathematics departments at master's level institutions and there are three reasons I listed there that came out of the interviews of why they tend to gravitate to those positions.

One is they are already employed at those positions. That is the main one. Another one is their desire to teach mathematics while working as pre-service teachers which is their primary responsibility at those places, even though every one of them would say that research is important; this is what I really want to do. Those are the comments that I hear from them and so they really want to spend their time teaching and doing professional development even though some of the places they go require them to do research and that is where the problems start and they have all those things to do and not the time to do that.

So, those are just references of the different things that I reported.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Any questions for clarification? I have one. Did you distinguish at all between people who received a doctorate in math education from say a college of education versus math education dissertation in a mathematics department?

DR. GLASGOW: Yes, the people who did a dissertation related to mathematics education from a math department are not in the study.

DR.BERGIN: You indicated that 20-something percent published their work in conference proceedings and about 20-some percent published in journals. Where are the others?

DR. GLASGOW: All kinds of places, book chapters. Of all the categories those are the highest two, all kinds of journals people have published in, different kinds, straight education journals all kinds of things and it is amazing what people put on their vita sometimes. I will just say that.

DR.BOYLAN: I am interested in the difference between the 838 dissertations that had some relationship to math education with 360 you finally pulled out as being primarily in math education. The majority of those I would say are education, education, education psychology people that tend to like to do research on teaching, learning and mathematics and so a great deal of those were not really doctorates in mathematics education but psychology or education psychology even possibly mathematics. So, the doctorates you looked at weren't necessarily just doctorates conferred by mathematics departments.

DR. GLASGOW: I am sorry, I didn't hear that.

DR. BOYLAN: When you did your original research on dissertations you didn't just restrict yourself to doctorates that were awarded by mathematics departments.

DR. GLASGOW: Right, well, actually most of the ones are awarded by colleges of education. Most doctorates in mathematics education are from colleges of education. There are very few mathematics education programs that are in mathematics departments.

DR. GOULD: That was the model that NC State people simply should be doing what Arizona State does.

DR. GLASGOW: The number has grown. I don't know how many but I would say, I am trying to think of the ones I know off the top of my head and University of Georgia was one of the first ones to have a mathematics education doctorate out of the mathematics department. Illinois State, Michigan State, I mean there are a handful but compared to all of the ones it is not as large a percentage.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: Do you have any sense of the numbers of people coming out of those programs or Chris might know that, too.

My sense of them is they tend not to produce very many. So, there might be 10 programs that we could name if we thought about it in that, really small numbers.

DR. GLASGOW: You have to remember nobody produces great numbers. Part of that doctoral conference was we actually did a study beforehand to see where these people are coming from because sometimes you know we would call deans and say, “Do you have a doctorate in mathematics education?" and they would say, "No." Then we would talk to faculty and they would say, "Yes, we do. We have one." So, it is a little hard to get hold of.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Last question and then we will go on and have general discussion.

DR. TANNER: Maybe it is a general question. It is not a specific question for Bob but I think that I am getting a little bit confused in terms of there are people who have PT in science or math education which I would call science educator. I am in applied terminology. And then there are people who have PhDs in a discipline where they may have done a thesis in science or math education and they have postdoctoral training in that field that are scientists or mathematician educators but there are these two different populations of people who do education research and what I have seen culturally and I guess I am asking whether or not this is true for you that education departments hire these folks and discipline departments hire these folks and never the cross shall meet and I am not saying that is a good thing but I am a little bit confused because of the data that we are hearing and how it sort of relates and aligns with the people on this side of the table and the questions at hand.

DR. GLASGOW; At the master's level or below they hire them all.

DR. TANNER; What do you mean at the master's level?

DR. GLASGOW: I mean in terms of non-research type institutions.

DR. TANNER: I am at a master's granting institution.

DR. GLASGOW; I mean my data shows that they hire mathematics education people from colleges of education.

DR. HEPPERT: There are traditional normal schools where the training of middle secondary teachers occurs in science programs and those science programs would be potentially hiring people who were doctorates out of science education or math education programs.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Okay, I will take the last word here because I can give you some data on my own students. Half my students have come out with a degree in science education specialty in physics. The other half are physics with a PhD in science ed. All of those people who went into higher education are now in physics departments.

DR. TANNER; What department are you in?

DR. ZOLLMAN; Physics.

DR. TANNER; So, half of your students in a physics department --

DR. ZOLLMAN; No, they are not in my department. I can supervise dissertations in the college of education and so half my students have come that route. The other half have come the other route. Actually they are almost indistinguishable. I bet if I asked Michael to tell me which was which he couldn't do it for the most part.

DR. TANNER; Maybe this is the place because this has come up for me for the last couple of hours. Physics and mathematics have probably more than 30 years. Somebody else can put a number on it of experience in this. Biology and geoscience are in a radically different frame.

DR. ZOLLMAN; That is absolutely true and actually physics and math I think are quite different right now.

Okay, what I would like to do is instead of going gradually into a general discussion I think I would like to follow the format that we have had before. Thanks to our speakers we are actually ahead of schedule right now so that we can have lunch on time.

Let us take about 3 minutes to talk in small groups and some up with some general questions, general discussion items that are related to the job market issue.

(Pause.)

DR. ZOLLMAN; So, we are focusing on the whole issue I guess of the job market. Both talks focused on people coming directly out of graduate school and going into the discipline and of course as we know from previous discussions here many people come out of it from the postdoc point of view. I think virtually everybody had some sort of experience and Michael had a postdoc before he went into a tenured track.

So, there is a little broader aspect here but I think we don't necessarily need to direct questions just to the two folks down there at the end of the table because we have got people who recently have looked for jobs, people who are hiring those kinds of people and people who have studied them.

So, with that let me open it up.

DR. GUZDIAL; Kimberly had mentioned that there are like eight people in the country?

DR. LIBARKIN: Maybe a dozen.

DR.GUZDIAL: Okay, maybe a dozen. All right. There are certainly nowhere near that in continuing education research, and I would doubt that in engineering education research there are that many either. There are only a couple of different departments of education engineering research.

One of the questions that I am interested in is how long have people been getting mathematics education research PhDs; how long have people been getting science education research PhDs, so, we could figure out what sort of trajectory can we predict in continuing education research and engineering education research.

DR. LIBARKIN: Let me clarify it? There is no one that I know of who has gotten a geoscience education PhD. There are three master's programs, three within geology departments so that all of the people who are hired are almost all geoscientists who have some interest. One guy had a really cool course and that is why he was hired. There are like one or two who are from colleges of education.

DR. TANNER; I think there is comparability in biology. Biology suffers a problem, you know, there is the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society and biology is like -- these are all very fragmented but the people that I know do not have PhDs in biology education. They don't and so, but your question I think is so pertinent because it has to do with what is the training stream and the people who I know who are biologist educators, they have gotten there through informal training. So, the people in my survey there was a director of outreach who transitioned. They turned it into a tenure track position for her. There are people who were in neurobiology but decided they wanted to do something in education. So, they contracted a joint position where they have to do both neurobiology research and science education research which I wouldn't take that job.

So, there is not a training stream in biology education and the training stream that there was, the postdoctoral fellowships in math-science education, the NSF, thank you NSF, I get a call every 3 weeks to a month, I can predict it, from someone who is trying to do that exact program and wants to come work with me and do that exact program. So, it is different in physics and math. So, your question could be answered more by physics and math.

DR. IMBRIE: Mark made a point that we haven't really talked about that much. He said computer science education research and I think what we are killing ourselves on we produce people, I am going to say that is a math ed person. That is teacher preparation. They are going to go practice that profession, but then there is another class that are going to be researchers. They are going to go be teachers because they are going to be a faculty member someplace, but their focus is research and I think why the greater community and I am going to say engineering, why people are confused is because they go, well, an engineering education PhD means you are going to be a good teacher and we already have lots of good teachers when really what we are trying to say is there is a class of researchers that are going to do research at the university. They are also going to teach but that is not -- they are like any other researcher that you hire and I think it is a combination of perspectives when we say that we are a math ed, science ed, engineering ed. It is like saying that you are an engineer. You have got to go to the next step and say what kind of engineer because there is a whole bunch of different kinds of engineers and NSF realizes this with how they are starting to change. They used to give, the CCLI program was all putting into practice, trying to reform through innovation in the practice of what you do but it was uninformed and I think no wonder we are having problems defining ourselves because in both Bob and Scott's talks I couldn't get a sense of who is actually going. We are producing as researchers and going and doing research that promotes understanding.

DR. WITTMANN: Maybe Dean can clarify this for me but if you are asking about the physics realm if I look at the first physics PhDs that dealt with physics education research those happened in the late seventies or early eighties I would say. The next 10 years until the early nineties there were occasional graduates coming out but none of them went to research type universities. I think the first true research university hires that happened, the specific point was for physics education research and the person's graduate school training had been in physics education research as a physicist to make it all the more complicated. Those didn't happen until 1999, 2000, 2001. So, there was about a 20-year lag in there where the research universities were hiring the people that were coming out of the research universities. Now, there is a lot more and this chart, I gave this chart that is in your notebook. That is only for the past couple of years in hires essentially since 2000. There is no data from the nineties and I don't think we have any good data from the nineties and that would be good to know.

DR. ZOLLMAN; The first PhD by the way was I think David Trowbridge from the University of Washington.

DR. HEPPERT; Melanie, how many chemistry programs around the country offer doctorates in chemical education?

DR. COOPER: About 15.

DR. HEPPERT: And probably five or six of those are quite recent.

DR. COOPER; Yes.

DR. HIXSON: And what would those PhDs call themselves? If you just said, “What is your degree in?" they would say, "Chemistry," not chemistry education?

DR. COOPER: Yes. So, I have a courtesy appointment in education. So, I have students who graduate with a degree in curriculum instruction and they have done all their research in the chemistry department. They have got jobs in schools of education and the first person to come out with a degree in chemistry, he is aiming to go after a postdoc to a research institution. That is what he wants to do.

PARTICIPANT: Go to a med school?

DR. COOPER: No, he wouldn't be accepted in a med school. He doesn't have teacher education and one of the problems is that all of the people who are advertising for chem ed people that is what they think that chemistry education people do particularly at the master's level.

DR. SMITH: How many chemistry education programs are there? There are 15 in chemistry departments, 150?

DR.HEPPERT; They are science educators.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Let us go to Bob and then Elizabeth.

DR. GLASGOW; To answer your question the first doctorate in math education was in 1915. It has been around for a while but there really wasn't a proliferation until late sixties which tells you why it came about. It was really part of K-12 mathematics curriculum. That is teacher education curriculum development. That was the impetus for most of these.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: But, Bob those probably weren't from math departments.

DR. GLASGOW; No, they were not, that is right, all colleges of education.

DR. SIMMONS: I have a question about the nature of the dissertation that somebody might write depending on for example whether they got their degree in the college of education in science education or say from a chemistry or a physics or mathematics department or alternatively depending on whether they were planning to go into the practice of science education and teacher preparation versus the dissertation they would write if they wanted to go into research rather than science education, can anybody comment on that for me?

DR. ZOLLMAN; I can. The dissertations really are not any different. The difference --

DR. SIMMONS: The topics aren't different?

DR. ZOLLMAN; Well, there is a little bit of difference. I should clarify that a little bit. People who, depending on what their background is in physics people who go the curriculum instruction dash science education route for me are not likely to do a dissertation related to the teaching and learning of quantum mechanics although there are some exceptions. I actually have an exception to that and that is in general because they don't understand quantum mechanics at the level that they need to in order to be able to ask the right questions so to speak, but if we are talking about things that are more in the classical physics area there wouldn't be a lot of difference. The real difference is in the course work that they take. So, a person who goes the physics route takes all the standard courses that any other physicist would take including some that are quite torturous for anybody and whereas the person who actually gets the degree is called curriculum instruction at our place would take far more education courses. Now, I require the physics students to take most of those education courses anyway but the education people don't take the physics courses. I don't know whether is just my personal way of doing things or whether that is transferrable somewhere else.

DR. WITTMANN: PhD institutions to add a point there from the PhD-granting institutions that are physics departments I think that is pretty universal. The big requirement is you have to fulfill the course requirements.

DR. ZOLLMAN; And we should add that physics has a remarkably standard set of courses that every graduate student takes independent of what institution. You know that but these other people may not.

Let me see, I saw Susan and Joan and then Helen.

DR. WITTMANN: And those courses are extensive.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Yes, and those courses are extensive.

DR. HIXSON: In most sciences the content of the PhD research is absolutely tied to the PhD director. So, what happens at your school if someone gets a PhD in science education working within the education school, would those contents look very different from yours?

DR. ZOLLMAN; Oh, yes, if they are not my students.

DR. HIXSON: So, then you would generally say that they look very different from yours, okay.

DR. ZOLLMAN; I don't take students who don't have master's degrees in physics by the way in the science education program.

DR. SIMMONS: What would the difference be? I just don't know. I haven't read those dissertations.

DR. HEPPERT; One way of thinking about this is that if you want to think about it that way there could be research component and a development component, two various educational projects and they don't necessarily always exist in the same project but if for example you were doing a research project that had a development component in a content discipline that development component would most likely focus around education at the undergraduate or graduate level in that particular area whereas the development component if you were from a school of education doing a project might revolve more around the K-12 component.

So, to a certain degree that is an artificial, that research and development part is an artificial distinction but I think you understand what I am trying to say.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: My own answer would be similar to Dean's in that I work both with students who come from mathematics departments and students who come from PhD programs in curriculum teacher education policy and from my view whatever problem the student chooses to study they need to have the adequate background to do that and so in many cases that is a substantial amount of mathematics if they want to study calculus learning or differential equations learning or something but I do want to make the point that at least in my interpretation of all this the dissertation is an educational research product. It is not, for mathematics it is not generally going to be a set of theorems that someone has proved. It is a piece of social science research and so no matter what the background is like it is my sense that the student needs to meet the expectations of doing very strong social science work and so even though the topic of the dissertation might differ the structure would look pretty similar for a student coming out of math or out of curriculum and instruction in at least my own experience. There has got to be a very strong connection to the existing literature, a strong theoretical framework, careful data gathering that is tied to those questions and so forth.

So, the standards of educational research would prevail in my view no matter what the background of the student looks like.

DR. COOPER; I was the first person from a disciplinary department to direct students over in curriculum and instruction and the first person to have chemical education PhD students. So, I am not exactly sure what is going to happen to the chem ed person but for me the difficulty was navigating the two different cultures which were terrifically different I thought. They weren't the same and basically my first student who was a teacher who came back with a master's and a PhD basically helped me navigate the culture which was very different than in the chemistry department. There was a huge amount of course work. People could essentially do this part time. They could do their course work spread out. There was a lot of course work and then I think that even though it is certainly a research based dissertation the amount of research in the dissertation from the curriculum instruction was not, the expectations were there wouldn't be as much and to do one magnificent experiment if you like and manipulate the data and so on and so forth and I think we were thrilled with the output that came from these students actually.

DR. LIBARKIN: Could I ask a clarification question? My experience and correct me if I am wrong I don't have that much experience with the ed programs, Harvard University, Indiana, for instance, is that those students, the graduate students in curriculum and instruction are not allowed to work on their PhD dissertation research.

DR. COOPER: That is right.

DR. LIBARKIN: Until they have finished their course work.

DR. COOPER; Yes.

DR. LIBARKIN: So those people who choose to do other -- you can have a lot of experience if you choose to but some college you might feel stymied because I mean I spent 5 years on my PhD. I had colleges who had spent a year on that special research and so what does that mean?

Is that true?

DR. COOPER; That is actually true. I mean we cheated because I was paid to pay these people to come and work with me and do research on the side kind of thing to get on with it and also the way the dissertation was developed and written was also culturally quite different than what I was expecting in chemistry.

So, when my first student in chemistry started to develop and do his preliminaries and he basically has to do master's degree in chemistry, in a traditional chemistry area, take all the chemistry courses, and some education courses and do the equivalent of a chemistry PhD thesis. When he did his preliminary oral the chemist on the committee said, “Okay, so what is in it for me? What are you going to tell me about how to teach?" All they wanted to hear was how is this going to change what I am going to do? How are you going to help me. So, we really had to think about that as we were moving along through the dissertation which was not at all what happened over in --

DR. GUZDIAL; I find totally amazing all the different answers to Elizabeth's question. There is diversity in the discipline PhD versus discipline education PhD how they differ or don't differ. So, it is really surprising Dean's answer that the PhD dissertations are essentially the same.

To offer another point in the college computing all we offer is PhD in computer science. We now offer a PhD in human centered computing as well but we haven't had students go that route in CS education. What we also have that gives us a sort of edge in terms of dealing with this issue is that we also have people who do research in education technology.

In educational technology one can make contributions in both computing and technology and I have had some students go down that path with a focus on computing as their discipline. So, I had one PhD student who studied modeling environments and how to create them in both chemical engineering and object-oriented modeling classes. So, there is a dissertation that can cross these sorts of bounds. I have a student working now studying college students who come from different intro computing courses how they level off their differences in their second computing course. That dissertation is going to be much more of a contribution to education and learning in computer science education than it is going to tell us about computing itself though I expect it will have some findings to inform us about what is the nature of computing.

DR. LEWIS: I wanted to add to what Melanie was saying. I have two students who will be defending PhDs in the chemistry department with a chemical education research emphasis. So, it is a new program just like Melanie's program is new and I would, also, like to say that even though the subject matter of the dissertation wouldn't look any different than if it were in the college of ed the amount of work that they are expected to do, the research they are expected to accomplish by that time is significantly greater in the chemistry department.

So, I have a wonderfully supportive colleague in science ed and I have had to educate him all along about how to help me advise these students as he would keep telling them that things were enough and I knew that with my colleagues there was no way and not the rigor of the research but simply not enough. So, that is a big difference to me in terms of the two cultures.

DR. GOULD: I was struck by that 18 years and maybe the dissertations aren't very different but that sure sounds like a difference in the culture of what you think you are going to do with that PhD. We had a student who got a PhD when he was 65 years old. I guess I am struggling to see that disciplines can survive if you are basically not getting a PhD until you are into your forties and fifties.

DR. HEPPERT: In the education field that will often be because you won't be able to enter a doctoral program and then become a faculty member until you have had quite a number of years of experience in teaching in the public schools. So, there is always the sense there that you have to have a pre-professional experience prior to going back and getting the higher education degree and then becoming a faculty member.

DR. GOULD: That is certainly very much defining what it means to do disciplinary research. I am not sure that is where people are coming from in physics particularly and I am not sure that that is going to help the people in the geosciences and biology as a viable discipline.

DR. HEPPERT: No, but I was merely saying that the length of time there is I think more a factor of this being a different culture than the one we are talking about in the STEM disciplines.

DR. ZOLLMAN; It is for promotion qualification rather than research.

Scott, then me, okay?

DR. ASHMANN: Two points. Just to follow up on that with the job postings many times 3 years is the magic number of K-12 experience that many positions are looking for. Some of them have bumped that up to 5 but those that have done that have found that they have diminished the pool of candidates that they have for the position as well.

So, 3 tends to be the magic number so to speak and to kind of summarize what many of you have been talking about the way that this was explained to me when I was looking for a PhD program in science education I heard this from two different institutions. You need to decide early on if you want to do science education with a capital "S" or a capital "E." And I also heard that same thing from the interviews that we did with the national leaders that a few of them mentioned that I quickly needed to determine if I was going to align myself with this culture in this department that was the capital "S" in science education or the capital "E" in science education and I realized I could not do both but I needed to choose one or the other and so that succinctly wrapped it up for me about the vision in science education of what you focus on.

DR. RASMUSSEN: It is similar in mathematics. You have a capital "M" or a capital "E." There is a growing body of a group of people like myself who are in the content departments with a capital "M" and I wouldn't be able to get a job in a college of education because they would say, "Peace Corps teaching experience, that doesn't count." So, I don't qualify and so there is not a huge number of us but there are a growing number of us that are capital "M."

DR.TANNER: I just want to comment that at some level there is just this whole group of people that aren't at the table and they are science educators. I mean I don't call myself a science educator. I call myself a scientist educator and so people with PhDs in science education and I feel like this whole conversation is about that fact that there is a group of people that have been around more like since 1915 or longer that are --

DR. ZOLLMAN; Anyone who has been around since 1915 won't be here for other reasons.

(Laughter.)

DR.TANNER: But I think those people are a key part of understanding how to make that work.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Okay, what I would like to do, we have got about 10 minutes here. One thing that came up in one of the earlier conversations this morning that I think could quite well be relevant to maybe the future of job hunting because I think both Chris and Louis mentioned that at this time discipline departments who may be sort of thinking about an education person are keeping that low on their priority because times are tough in science education in general and at NSF and as a result of that there may not be job openings coming up in the disciplines as there have been in the past. Is that a fair interpretation of what you folks were saying?

DR. GOULD: Yes.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Any thoughts on what effect that is going to have on the near future? There may just not be as many jobs particularly in research extensive universities as we would like to have.

DR. WITTMANN: I am worried. I have four PhD students right now. My first one is finishing up. He has got 3 years of high school teaching experience. He is actually barely younger than I am which is often very awkward and I am worried about those of my students who wish to go into research one type universities and are being met by this problem in physics but I am more worried by our center on our campus. We consistently have biologists for example who want to do biology education research and our biology department has basically said that is a faculty line. We are not going to give up a faculty line for education research and start something new no matter how much demand there is and how many graduate students we can pick up and how many tuition dollars we could get out of it. We are not going to do it and I don't know how to -- when there is even a demand from inside from the students' points of view I don't know how to address something that would strengthen our center and our interdisciplinary work. We need somebody doing biology education research and the department for strong reasons doesn't want to. I don't know what to do about that.

DR.TANNER: Wouldn't it be great if we could apply for a training grant?

(Laughter.)

DR. LIBARKIN: To follow up actually in geoscience education half of the positions of the eight that people I talked to were created not because of a need. They are created because the higher ups said that we have some money. This is something good and the department said, "Oh, great." In my position they wanted a mineralogist. They didn't want a geoscience educator but that is what the title was. That is what the money was for. I am not a mineralogist and so I think that sort of leads into another problem which is maybe for the next part of this discussion is what is geoscience education; what is science education within the discipline? Is it practice? It is research? What is it? I think that I know from the people I talked to there was this broad perspective of what it meant to be a geoscience educator and therefore what the positions mean when they are created and what the faculty around you think you do and I think that has implications for the future of the field across disciplines.

DR. PIMMEL; Because of where you did your research, which journals you looked at it was ask people where they found the jobs in science education with a capital "S." That is not to say change here but maybe it is second set of reasons.

DR. ZOLLMAN; That is a good point because when Scott was talking I was thinking you know you would not have found -- you are a year late but if you had done this a year earlier you would have not found the job posting that we had because we are looking for discipline people and there is only one place, well, there are two places, and they are related the American Institute of Physics web site and Physics Today and those are the only places we would advertise.

DR. ASHMANN: This 600 was definitely an underestimation of the number of positions available because of the limited number of sources that we looked at.

DR. PIMMEL: The reason I asked is not only am I worried about under but I think the science departments would go to their own organ or something like Science.

DR. ASHMANN: Right and one thing that we did do to partially combat that was when we looked at the chronicle we did not just look in the education section. We looked at all sections of the chronicle including the mathematics section and the natural sciences section and actually we decided to read all of the ads for each issue because we found that even though something as obscure as museum administration might very well be looking for someone that has a science education or a math education background because of the nature of the museum being a science museum. So, we decided to be as inclusive as we could with the sources that we used.

DR. BERGIN; So data showed about 100 graduates in science and math education, PhD graduates in science and math education and about 100 positions. I am wondering what fraction of the total positions in science and math that represents and what percentage of the graduates in science and math. Is it 1 percent, 5 percent, 10 percent?

DR. ASHMANN: What we found in looking at the supply side we only looked at the 10 institutions in math education and 10 in science education partially because of the amount of resources we had to do this study.

For example, we ran into an issue of what constitutes a math education program or a science education program. If an institution graduates one individual with a PhD in math education for example in every 7 years does that constitute a program or not and along with the issues that we had with the dissertation abstracts database and the NRC data we never really did come up with a handle on the supply side of the equation.

DR. BURGE; You had one-third of the people on your response were going for sort of the science and the other two-thirds were college ed people and I know you are already reading the chronicle. So, you can't take time out to read all the other disciplines but perhaps maybe one of them and estimating looking at how many are going back to a sample from the chronicle and just getting an estimate and I am afraid the numbers are getting skewed and we are only seeing 100 people or maybe it is 200 in that case.

DR. ASHMANN; I think that might be a good way to augment this.

DR. COOPER: You wouldn't have caught chemistry either because we only advertise in the Chemical and Engineering News but I was going to say there are lots of chemistry education research positions being advertised this year for example, more than I have seen before and Clemson is one of them. We are advertising for a chemistry education research position and the reason we got that was because I threw a fit for one thing. We are only allowed to hire in so-called "emphasis" areas now. We have emphasis areas and it just so happened that general education is an emphasis area. So, we can use this idea of hiring people that are going to improve undergraduate education as a recruiting tool. So, I think that that is important and I think in our case the support is on up the line and I think it pays off and I also think that if we can get some key figures within say the chemistry community to support this it will go a lot further as well.

I think we can say, "Oh, well, so and so thinks this is a good idea, and they are going to hire chemistry education people and look at all the places that have these programs now." I mean there are a lot more than there were 15 years ago for example.

So, I am not as doom and gloom as some are.

DR. FERRINI-MUNDY: This conversation is fascinating and it is making me curious about two questions, both of which I think could be studied empirically. I mean I don't think it is obvious what the answers are and one is are we at a point where there really are two different fields that are being discussed here, the science education with a capital "S" and science ed with a capital "E" or scientist educators and science educators, and if those are really taking shape as two, and surely they overlap but perhaps two slightly different intellectual communities, intellectual endeavors, what are the implications for graduate education, for faculty hiring and promotion, for institutional planning and infrastructure and so forth? So, that is one line of questioning but another one that I think is even maybe more interesting is what are the implications for the general hard problems that the country faces in science and mathematics teaching and learning and if that is really what this is all about, right, our common interests might well be focusing on questions about how to improve the prospects for teaching and learning in mathematics and science at all levels, K through the undergraduate into the graduate level. If that is an endeavor, sort of a field of study what are the policy implications and even funding implications if it is starting to shape itself as two kind of different areas and how sensible is that and so forth? I think that this just opens up for me a whole bunch of very intriguing but slightly terrifying questions actually.

DR. GOULD: I would agree with that. I mean there are various definitions. Learning science is one and the science of learning is the other. This discipline is going to collapse the science of learning with the scientists and pulls everybody together in that and then you have really got an intellectual discipline that no question would have some legs and could go for decades.

DR. ZOLLMAN; I have got two pressing comments here, one from Michael and then Joe and then we are going to quit.

DR. WITTMANN: I know from within my department which is all physicists they are very happy that I am doing work in cognitive science and in learning theory because as they pointed out to me it is the appropriate theory for the work that I am doing and until there is a theory behind the work that I am doing it "ain't" science. It is just applications. So, that is a point of support for your comments.

DR. HEPPERT: I think Joan's point is well taken but at the same time I don't feel that either dealing with educational issues, educational problems and research problems in higher ed or in K-12 ed that the answer is necessarily in each of those venues going to come from one or the other.

In fact, I think the best answers will come from a appropriate collaborations between educational and science based educational researchers and from that perspective and this is going to sound a little parochial but I think it would be a very dangerous thing if the sciences abrogated research on learning in the sciences completely to individuals outside of our disciplines, if we didn't take responsibility within our discipline for developing a substantial base of scholarship about the learning of our own disciplines.

DR. ZOLLMAN; Actually the last four comments were a better summary and reflection than I could have had on this session and we are out of time anyway.

Okay, a couple of reminders. When lunch ends which is precisely at 1 o'clock you should move to your breakout group. The administrators get to stay in here and since I am moderating that I can say that is because we know administrators have trouble finding their way around.

(Laughter.)

DR. ZOLLMAN; One faculty group goes next door. The other one, unfortunately, goes to the tenth floor.

(Thereupon, at 12:10 p.m., a recess was taken until 1:55 p.m., the same day.)