A new study of college faculty members suggests that most view professional behavior as something they should demonstrate for their students but don’t need to explicitly teach.
The study was conducted by Sandra Nadelson, an associate professor of nursing at Boise State University, and Louis Nadelson and Richard Osguthorpe, both assistant professors of education at Boise State. They administered open-ended surveys to 34 faculty members in their university’s college of education, 24 in its college of engineering, and 25 in its nursing department, and then analyzed the responses.
The researchers found that nearly 60 percent of the respondents said they had a responsibility to model professional behavior for their students, but only about 15 percent indicated that they thought it was important for them to teach professional behavior by explicitly communicating to students what would be be expected of them in this area. Of the three fields examined, nursing stood out as the one where faculty members were most likely to see promoting professional behavior as important. In all fields, full-time faculty members were more likely to promote the development of professional behavior than part-timers.
The researchers characterized most of the faculty members surveyed as “tentative” in their descriptions of how much their administration and their peers support efforts to develop professional behavior in students. And although the accreditation boards for the fields they examined all have set professional behavior standards, there appeared to be little consensus among faculty members in each discipline as to what exactly amounted to professional behavior in their respective fields.
For their part, the researchers defined “professional behavior” as verbal and nonverbal behavior that demonstrates the ethics and values associated with a given discipline. In keeping with the ethics of education researchers, they cautioned that their study has serious limits, in that it was based on responses from faculty members in just three departments of one university and had a fairly small sample size. —Peter Schmidt
