THE PREPARING FUTURE FACULTY PROGRAM: WHAT DIFFERENCE DOES IT MAKE?
by A. Leigh DeNeef

Appendix: Summary Statistical Tables
The survey of 271 doctoral alumni from Arizona State, Duke, Florida State, Howard, Minnesota, Northwestern, and University of Washington generated
129 responses, a response rate of 48 percent. Alumni were asked to assess the effectiveness of various components of a “typical” PFF program by rating those components on a scale of 1 (not valuable) to 5 (highly valuable). The individual components were themselves grouped into nine general categories (see Table C on page 23).

1. Professional development programs outside of PFF
2. Job Search
3. Faculty Life
4. Teaching
5. Mentor Relationships
6. Cluster Site Visits: Activities
7. Cluster Site Visits: Lessons
8. Graduate Institution Programs
9. Overall Impact of PFF1

Responses were subsequently sorted in terms of mean scores of all respondents (Tables A and B) and mean scores by institution (not included here). Responses were also sorted in terms of the percentage of given activities not covered by individual PFF programs (Table E), by ethnicity (Table F), and by general academic disciplines (Table G).

Two problems became immediately apparent. First, the 129 respondents were spread unevenly across institutions, so that Duke University had a considerably higher number of responses than the other six schools (probably because the survey originated from there). In order to adjust for this, we subsequently calculated all means both with and without the Duke numbers. In addition, we obtained a very small number of responses from some institutions, making it difficult to have confidence in an average response for those clusters. A second major problem—which appeared once we began comparing mean scores among institutions—was simply that not all PFF programs emphasized or even included the same set of activities. In this case, one of the strengths of PFF—that programs are tailored to the needs of the local cluster—was, for comparative purposes, a handicap.

Because of these problems, we have chosen here to present only aggregate results of the survey. The first two summaries are of PFF “Value” Question Results: Sorted by Mean scores. We present these summaries in two formats: the first (Table A) represents mean scores from all respondents; the second (Table B) represents mean scores without the responses from Duke alumni.
Tables C and D, PFF “Value” Question Results: Sorted by Category, represents the individual survey questions grouped with similar activities. Here we present the mean scores for the category in two distinct ways. In Table C, we indicate the aggregate means for all respondents to the survey. But it also became clear to us in this table that some of our questions addressed issues that were neither goals nor priorities of the PFF program itself (even though some clusters had included them in their programs). Thus, in Table D, we recalculated the means scores by subtracting those items which over 40 percent of alumni said were “not covered” by their local PFF cluster. We report these recalibrated means in gray.

Table E, then, reports PFF “Value” Question Results: Sorted by Percent “Not Covered.” Many of the items listed here with high percentage rates of “not covered” are activities normally associated with traditional disciplinary and departmental graduate training: writing research statements, identifying research funding prospects, locating potential jobs. But it is striking that nearly 30 percent of responding alumni stated that they did not shadow a mentor or receive any assistance in drafting a cover letter for a job application; over 60 percent said they did not observe classes on the cluster campus, participate in any formal pedagogical coursework, or observe a cluster faculty meeting. Many of these activities we would have assumed to be “core components” of virtually all clusters.

Table F represents PFF “Value” Question Results: Sorted by Ethnicity and Table G reports PFF “Value” Question Results: Sorted by Discipline. Both tables attempt to provide a demographic snapshot of the alumni completing the survey and the relative value of PFF experiences to the different groups.