The UNM College of Education’s teacher education and professional development program was recently ranked as the 8th best graduate program in the nation by Academic Analytics as part of a new university ranking system. Academic Analytics examined the scholarly production of 7,300 programs in 104 disciplines across the country.
College of Education Dean Viola Florez said, "This ranking is very important, as it speaks positively about the power of and trend of multidisciplinary work, collaboration, and high quality faculty. The college has recruited excellent faculty who are experts in specific fields; making it possible to meet educational needs of students."
Partially funded by the State University of New York at Stony Brook, this new rating system is an effort to make a more objective comparison of programs across universities.
Currently most universities depend upon the U.S. News & World Report's annual rankings of graduate programs, even though those rankings are based on people’s opinions and are widely acknowledged as not being scientific. Not surprisingly, the best-known institutions were named in the top 10 year after year irrespective of their currently scholarly production.
The National Research Council compiles the gold standard of ranking programs. However, this study has not been updated since 1955.
Academic Analytics decided to take a different approach, where scholarly output could be objectively measured. In many ways, it used a standard business model adapted for an academic environment.
It created a Faculty Productivity Index by counting the number of book and journal articles published by the faculty in each program's faculty, how often those publications were citied by other scholars, and how many awards, grants and honors were received.
"The Faculty Productivity Index is important to teacher educators because it provides recognition for their work in K-12, plus it recognizes the creation of new knowledge for others to read, study, and implement in diverse educational settings," Florez said.
Media Contact: Steve Carr, (505) 277-1821; e-mail: scarr@unm.edu