ACE Brief Examines Faculty Perceptions of Student-Facing Roles

​Class discussions, the incorporation of real-life problems, and small-group activities are among the most frequently used instructional methods in postsecondary education, and most faculty say they have good or excellent mentoring relationships with undergraduate and graduate students.

These are among the findings in the ACE brief Faculty Perceptions of Student, Institution, and Community Engagement, which uses insights from the 2023 Higher Education Research Institute (HERI) Faculty Survey to highlight differences in faculty perceptions of their student-facing roles, such as teaching, student engagement, and engagement external to the classroom. Additionally, the authors encourage senior leaders to use insights from the report and their internal data to ask themselves a variety of questions to understand campus-specific contexts, including:

• How does your institution invest in faculty-student mentorship?

• As teaching and learning modalities evolve, how is your institution seizing opportunities to integrate predictive and generative AI into academic, administrative, and research functions?

• How is your institution promoting and incentivizing faculty to engage in professional development?

"Insights from the HERI Faculty Survey underscore the complexity of the roles faculty hold and illuminate the variance across academic rank, faculty type, and institutional control," the authors write.

This brief is the third in a series of four HERI briefs. The first two briefs used insights from the Diverse Learning Environments Survey to analyze students' perceptions of their learning environments and why they consider stopping out.

The final brief in this series will offer insights from the CIRP Freshman Survey, the next iteration of which is open through October. The CIRP Freshman Survey, which will run its 60th administration in 2025, is the longest-running survey of incoming freshmen in the country.

Last summer, ACE and the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies (UCLA Ed&IS) announced a partnership to strengthen and lead HERI, administered by CRESST, a research and development center within UCLA Ed&IS. Through their partnership, ACE and UCLA Ed&IS are working to elevate and expand HERI's research and reach through ACE's extensive capacity and expertise in faculty and presidential-level data collection and research.

Read more about the partnership here.