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Do Science Professors Get Enough Credit?

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By Jennifer Jacobson

As an associate professor of biology, Paul A. Porneluzi wants to get credit for every hour he spends in the classroom at Central Methodist College. And he does, if he's teaching a traditional lecture course, but not if he's teaching a laboratory session.

When his college calculates his teaching load it gives him full credit for the lecture courses, but only half credit for the laboratory courses.

This academic year, Central Methodist is reviewing how it defines faculty workload issues, and Mr. Porneluzi wants his college to give credit where credit is due: His two-hour lab course should count as two hours in the classroom. "It's every bit as intense as a traditional classroom lecture course," he says. "You're constantly walking around the room answering questions and trying to create a situation in the lab where students can observe things and start thinking about things."

But he's fighting an uphill battle. Traditionally, most colleges have awarded science professors only partial credit for teaching labs. And perennial lobbying by science professors hasn't changed that. Lab courses continue to be viewed on many campuses as less than rigorous, easier for professors to teach and easier on students.

While those outside the sciences may imagine labs in which science professors sit with their feet up on their desks reading the newspaper while students follow a recipe-like experiment, science professors say that's hardly the case. Preparing a good lab course takes time, they say, and showing students what they should be observing, as well as answering their myriad questions, takes considerable energy.

Take Mr. Porneluzi. This fall, he is teaching two lecture sections of general biology at Central Methodist and six lab sections. Enrollment in the labs is usually capped at 22 to 27 students. He has an undergraduate student assigned to him through the work-study program who assists with some of the setup and cleanup of the labs. Even with the student's help, Mr. Porneluzi says he often spends three or four hours of his own time each week preparing the labs.

He thinks the reputation of lab courses as easy to teach may have grown out of the tradition at research universities of having graduate students teach the labs, rather than faculty members. And while some poorly designed labs are gut courses, he says, so are some traditional lecture courses.

"Good lab teaching," Mr. Porneluzi says, "is not sitting there in front of specimens but creating hands-on activities and helping students interpret them."

Mr. Porneluzi hopes that humanities professors at the college will support a credit increase for their science peers. "We have very strict controls on class size for writing courses -- no more than 15 students in some," he says. "I suppose this is so English faculty can do a good job of teaching students how to write. I'd like to see a policy in the science department so we can do as best a job as possible in teaching labs by making the workload more equitable."

Roger Kugler, vice president and dean of the college, says it is currently reviewing workloads for all courses and departments. He predicts that the college will increase the credit professors receive for teaching labs, though only to 0.66 of an hour's credit for every hour of lab.

"There is a need for some compromise if it's affordable," he says. "That's where we're headed."

Mr. Kugler says there's no uniformity among colleges assigning credit for labs since institutions vary by enrollment and budget; some can afford to offer full credit and others can't. To afford giving full credit at Central Methodist, he says, the college would have to reduce the amount of "contact time" that faculty members must spend in the classroom, and he says the college won't do that. He says the college would also not consider such options as paying professors extra for teaching more than a full load, hiring adjuncts, or increasing enrollment in lab courses and decreasing the number offered.

For science professors at Widener University, it's not an issue. They receive one hour of credit for every hour they spend teaching a lab course. "It's been like that for the 27 years I've been here," says Lawrence W. Paneck, associate provost. "We have always traditionally felt that laboratory experience was just as important -- sometimes more difficult for faculty members to teach -- as lecture. So we have treated it the same way."

And so has Saint Cloud State University, although technically campus policy states that science professors receive only one credit hour for every two hours of lab they teach. "We've been pretty lucky within our college that the dean comes from the biology department and understands what lab is like, so we pretty much go on contact hours," says Patricia L. Hauslein, an associate professor of biology. That means every hour of a lab equals an hour of a faculty member's required teaching load.

This fall, Ms. Hauslein is teaching a section of a general biology course and a section of a four-hour lab that goes with it. The college, she says, has made a strong effort to make the labs "inquiry-based" as opposed to just having students fill out worksheets about the experiments they have done in class.

"We think that lab experience is equally as important as lecture, and so we don't just shuttle students off to do cookbook kinds of lab experiments," she says. Instead, professors seek to engage students in critical thinking, which is a lot more work for everyone involved. The more complicated the science, the more chemicals and materials and procedures that are needed to set up the lab, Ms. Hauslein says.

Teaching these courses has been even more of a challenge this year, she says, because budget cuts have left her department with no teaching assistants. "We usually have eight," Ms. Hauslein says. "So we're running labs with undergraduates as T.A.'s this semester." That means more work for the professors since undergraduates aren't as knowledgeable as graduate students.

In a well-designed lab course, she says, professors set up the experiment and guide students through it. Then, once it's over, she says, they must help students "understand what happened, write up sophisticated lab reports, and understand graphing statistics." She adds: "The payoff is obvious compared to cookbook labs because not only does the lab give them a good set of skills but the quality of their thinking is, by the end of the semester, dramatically different."

Despite all the work that goes into them, labs on her campus will never officially go on the books as warranting full credit because humanities and social-science departments wouldn't like it, Ms. Hauslein says. "The issue of fairness would come up because an English professor would say, We don't run labs, but we spend hours reading papers. Why don't we get an hour of credit for that?"

Suellen Rundquist, chairwoman of Saint Cloud's English department, says she has never thought about the issue. "I'm so engrossed in our department and what our needs are," she says. "As far as we're concerned, yes, we think we should get more credit for grading papers. Certainly it's an issue we're always dealing with. We have to fight to make sure class size doesn't get too high. But I've never put it in terms of, or in the context of, what science professors are doing."

At the University of Akron-Wayne College, faculty members in the sciences receive only a half hour of credit for every hour they spend teaching labs. But they are not clamoring for more, given the budget constraints in the state. "We're a small college, with two people in the biology department, one person in physics, one person in chemistry, and one person in engineering," says Emily A. Rock, a professor of biology. "We realize there would be other priorities besides recognizing contact hours in lab, so we're not trying to make this a big issue. We're trying to be team players."

Still, Ms. Rock remains optimistic that science professors will finally get the credit they deserve. As more of her peers emphasize critical thinking and problem solving, that will "help emphasize and focus how much learning goes on in the lab," she says. "It's not just getting out a tray of slides and saying, 'Oh, is that algae?'"