Robert Boice

The New Faculty Member: Supporting and Fostering Professional Development

1. Introduction: New FacultyA Neglected Resource Part One: Obstacles Confronting New Faculty Members 2. Gaining the Acceptance of Colleagues 3. Establishing Teaching Styles and Skills 4. Developing Habits of Writing Productivity Part Two: Helping New Faculty Overcome Obstacles 5. Mentoring to Build Collegiality 6. Establishing Basic Teaching Skills 7. Encouraging Scholarly Productivity 8. Helping New Faculty Help Themselves Part Three: Building an Institutional Support System 9. Recruitment and Orientation 10. Retention and Tenure 11. Tailoring Programs to Special Needs 12. Enlisting Chairs and Other Administrators 13. Strategies for Getting Programs Under Way Resource: Questionnaire Used to Interview New Faculty.

Development of dominance in domestic rats in laboratory and seminatural environments.

Dominance hierarchies were studied in mixed-sex colonies of albino rats Rattus norvegicus reared and housed in three different types of physical environments. Colonies were observed. In either an outdoor pen, an indoor pen, or in laboratory cases for a period of 24 weeks initiated at 35 days of age. In both pen colonies, male dominance relationships were based on the asymmetric display of biting attacks by dominants and the unequivocal display of submissive postures by subordinates. These behaviours did not fully develop, nor did dominance emerge until males were 140-150 days of age. No asymmetric display of attacks and submission, nor dominance relationships were observed in two different types of laboratory cage settings; these males continued to play fight throughout adulthood. However, males of all colony types attacked male intruders. The nature of the physical environment appeared to have a powerful influence on the development of dominance, but did not affect agonistic behaviour directed toward intruders.

Procrastination, busyness and bingeing

The first inquiry employed repeated surveys and direct observations of procrastinators to question two traditional assumptions about procrastinators--that they are reliable reporters of how they spend workweeks, and that they are not easily observed in the act of procrastinating. The second inquiry tested an intervention for procrastination (helping new faculty find brief, daily sessions in which to write) that proved effective and relatively unaversive. The effectiveness of the intervention helped to confirm the notion that procrastination of a relatively unstructured activity like scholarly writing has at least two central components, bingeing and busyness.

New faculty involvement for women and minorities

I used variations of Astins involvement model to guide a study of four cohorts of women and minorities as new faculty: two groups from a comprehensive university and two of them from a research campus. The two least demanding levels of inquiry for both interviewer and interviewee—unstructured and structured—provided rich descriptions of disappointments, problems, and values that distinguished nontraditional new hires from a matched sample of white male newcomers. More demanding levels of inquiry and analysis—a New Faculty Faring Index with 20 rating dimensions and a repeated exercise in career mapping—distinguished successful and unsuccessful new faculty in ways that suggest reliable sequences of career fault lines and specific interventions to avoid them. Thus, the most useful interviews were the most involving. Involvement notions also predicted the outcome of new faculty experiences: women and minorities tended to be less effectively immersed in their campuses and in self-help actions than were white males, but nontraditional newcomers who managed the highest levels of involvement evidenced the most promise for successful careers.

IS RELEASED TIME AN EFFECTIVE COMPONENT OF FACULTY DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMS

A review of the literature on released-time programs shows a trend away from uncritical acceptance. Emerging skepticism about released time from teaching or service stems from a lack of evidence supporting its usefulness and from the mixed messages it gives about the value of teaching. Four demonstrational experiments confirm that skepticism by showing that (1) verified assessments of normal work loads contradict faculty claims of being too busy for additional scholarship; (2) faculty given released time usually persist in old habits; (3) new faculty showed no obvious benefits of a typical released-time program; and (4) faculty in released-time programs verbalized real doubts about how to use extra time for meaningful scholarship. A fifth experiment suggests an alternative to traditional released-time programs: faculty who claimed too little time for regular scholarship learned to produce significant amounts of writing by finding time for brief, daily writing sessions.

Cognitive Components of Blocking

Sixty subjects, 40 of them blockers, provided over 5000 examples of self-talk accompanying the initiation and completion of writing sessions. An inductive procedure of sorting those thought-list cards into reliable and discrete categories produced 7 cognitive components of blocking (listed in descending order of importance): (1) work apprehension, (2) procrastination, (3) dysphoria, (4) impatience, (5) perfectionism, (6) evaluation anxiety, and (7) rules. Blockers were more likely than nonblockers to list negative thoughts and less likely to evidence “psych-up” thoughts during writing sessions.

Assessment of agoraphobia—II: Measurement of clinical change

Abstract This paper reviews conceptual and methodological assessment issues germane to agoraphobia outcome research, and a core set of agoraphobia measures and uniform clinical change criteria are proposed. The limitations of physiological measurement for treatment outcome purposes are discussed, and suggestions are offered for effective utilization of triple response measurement for agoraphobia research.

Midi-level measurement of social anxiety in psychiatric and non-psychiatric samples

Abstract This paper reports the development and assessment of midi-level behavioral measures of social anxiety in the context of two experiments, one studying an analog student sample, the other a psychiatric sample. Judgments on nine categories of clinically practical midi-level behaviors (e.g. Facial Expression, Orienting, Sense of Timing), based on a review of the literature on human ethology and on pilot research, were compared to global judgments of social anxiety and social skill and to physiological arousal. Intraclass correlations exceeded 0.80 for judgments of the global and midi-level behavioral ratings on both samples. Results of correlational analyses indicated that while there were several significant predictors of global skill and anxiety among the midis, the magnitude of the relationship between midis and globals was stronger for the patient than the student sample. Further analyses based on S s heart rate (HR) reactivity suggested that while global ratings did not significantly predict H R in a high social anxiety situation, one midi-level behavioral rating (self-manipulations) did. The clinical utility of the newly developed measures is discussed with particular attention to their practicality for behavior therapy.

Genetic influences on digging behaviors in mice (mus musculus) in laboratory and seminatural settings.

Digging behaviors of several inbred strains of laboratory mice and some of their crosses were examined in three contexts. In laboratory burrow boxes, C57BL/6Abg mice constructed more sophisticated burrow systems than did BALB/cAbg mice. Their F1 hybrids built burrow systems more complex than either parental strain. The same pattern of genetic influence was observed in an outdoor pen. In an escape task that required digging, BALB/c mice escaped more quickly than did C57BL/6 mice; their F1 hybrids showed dominance toward the BALB/c phenotype. These results indicate that behavioral polymorphisms in digging behavior, which may relate to habitat selection, have a genetic basis. The dominance and overdominance toward the better digging parental strain in each type of task suggest the possible evolutionary importance of these digging behaviors.

Increasing the writing productivity of ‘blocked’ academicians

Abstract Individual case histories of six academicians who sought treatment for complaints of an inability to do professional writing are presented. All were exposed to a treatment program of at least a years duration that included weekly therapy sessions and attendance at group support meetings as regular treatment components. Use of a contracted, external contingency was manipulated experimentally in an ABAB design. The results (measured in terms of numbers of verified pages of writing) indicate that while general treatment components were adequate to produce sporadic writing, use of an external contingency was necessary for the establishment of stable levels of productivity over extended periods of scheduled writing days and at follow-ups a year beyond treatment. Two of the writers required recontracting for a second external contingency before that stability was achieved. A third, who was referred as potentially suicidal over her writing problems, was treated with a lengthy program of successive approximations to formal composition. Taken together, the data of these subjects suggest that writing ‘blocks’ can be treated effectively with conventional behavioral techniques, especially that of contingency management.