Eric L. Dey

College Environments, Diversity, and Student Learning

The research literature on students in higher education is both rich and varied, even though the concerns addressed in this literature effectively resolve to three primary questions (Dey and Feldman, 1999): What sorts of people go to college, what experiences do they have at college, and what sorts of people do they become by the end of their college experience? To generate meaningful answers to these primary questions requires not only careful consideration of the attributes of students, but also of the educational environments that they encounter during their journey through the postsecondary education enterprise.

Changing Patterns of Publication Productivity: Accumulative Advantage or Institutional Isomorphism?.

The study presented in this article investigated two competing perspectives - accumulative advantage and institutional isomorphism - on the relationship between publication productivity and institutional hierarchy. Accumulative advantage suggests that increased institutional differentiation should occur over time as highly ranked institutions extend their advantage, whereas institutional isomorphism suggests that social processes will cause institutions to become increasingly similar. Institutional data, derived from three national surveys of American college faculty, conducted between 1972 and 1992, were used. The results provide support for both perspectives, which is perhaps best explained by the open yet competitive nature of the American higher education system

Dimensions of Faculty Stress: A Recent Survey

Abstract: This study considers off-campus stressors that affect faculty and examines sources of stress perceived by different faculty groups. Its database is some 35,500 respondents to a recent national survey of faculty at nearly 400 colleges and universities. While different groups of faculty perceive varying stress levels, they also perceive different dimensions of stress. The paper discusses implications for practice and future research.

College Impact, Student Impact: A Reconsideration of the Role of Students within American Higher Education.

American college students tend to be viewed in terms of inputs and outcomes, due in part to the assessment movement and long-standing interest in college impact. A more complete view is one in which the relationship between students and the college environment is both reciprocal and dynamic. This ecological perspective portrays students as actively shaping their educational environments, with these environments simultaneously providing the potential for transforming the individual. Data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) are used to explore the ecological perspective.

Student preceptions of institutional and instructor based techniques for dealing with academic dishonesty

Research suggests that a large percentage of engineering students engage in some form of academic dishonesty. To investigate this very serious concern, the authors have undertaken a research project on the Perceptions and Attitudes toward Cheating among Engineering Students (PACES). The premise of this research is that a combination of pressures, rather than malicious motivations, account for most student cheating. This paper focuses on a portion of the PACES survey; student opinions on what actions might prevent cheating. The authors examined data collected from approximately 350 engineering and pre-engineering undergraduate students at 5 institutions. In the survey, the students were presented with 23 institutional and instructor based actions and asked to comment on whether itch actions would prevent them from cheating if they might have been inclined to cheat under other circumstances. Student responses to those actions along with subsequent statistical analysis are reported. Practical implementations of several student-identified techniques are then discussed.

A Variety of Diversity: Facing Higher Education’s Educational Challenges

First among the many important challenges facing American higher education is the need to improve the effectiveness of our educational programs. Public concern has heightened the sense of urgency for colleges and universities to make progress on improving and measuring educational outcomes, which is made more challenging by the varieties of diversity facing us. Diversity is not just an issue related to student recruitment or experience, but rather it is one that also relates to institutions and their faculties. New educational methods must address such diversity to be effective, and one possible example can be found in ongoing research at the University of Michigan that explores the educational implications of implementing a web‐based lecture capture system in large lecture courses. Student use of and reactions to such systems is important, as is the potential to influence course performance for students in general, but also for underrepresented and at‐risk student subpopulations. In addition to helping b...