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Doctoral programs

By JohnL on Dec. 2, 2005.

Today I learned that the US National Research Council will repeat its previous studies about the quality of doctoral programs.

The National Research Council has launched its latest project to assess U.S. research doctorate programs. Like previous efforts in 1983 and 1995, the new study is designed to help universities improve the quality of these programs through benchmarking; provide potential students and the public with accessible, readily available information on doctoral programs nationwide; and enhance the nation’s overall research capacity.

The focus of the effort is on research areas generating new knowledge. The committee expressly excluded education and similar fields, including special education, because research in those areas aims to improve practice.

Recommendation 3.5: The number of fields should be increased, from 41 to 57.
A number of additional programs in applied fields urged that they be included in the study. The Committee decided not to include those fields for which much research is directed toward the improvement of practice. These fields include social work, public policy, nursing, public health, business, architecture, criminology, kinesiology, and education. This exclusion is not intended to imply that high quality research is not conducted in these fields. Rather, in those areas in which research is properly devoted to improving practice, evaluation of such research requires a more nuanced approach than evaluation of scholarly reputation alone. It should also include measures of the effectiveness of the application of research. The Committee’s view is that this task is beyond the capacity of the current or proposed methodology. It does recommend that, if these fields can achieve a consensus on how to measure the quality of research, the NRC should consider including such measures in future studies.

It would be good to develop that consensus, no?