An Evaluation of a Workshop with a Focus on Fostering Teaching Excellence through Research

Securing funding from prestigious national organizations and private foundations is essential for faculty members to show that their research on innovative educational issues is valuable and equivalent to that of their colleagues who perform regular research projects. In order to address this need, the minority Ph.D. project representing AfricanAmericans, Hispanic-Americans, and Native Americans requested the principal investigators of a laboratory to conduct a workshop to train Ph.D. students to pursue teaching excellence by obtaining research grants. The authors developed a hands-on workshop where the participants assumed the role of panel reviewers and critiqued a proposal that planned to adapt and implement exemplary engineering case studies for use in business classrooms. This paper provides an overview of the workshop and results from an evaluation study. In addition, this workshop was repeated with a group of faculty members at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2004 and AMCIS 2005). The positive evaluation results from these workshops indicate that the hands-on methodology used to train the participants is worthwhile, is helpful in increasing their ability to pursue teaching excellence through research and funding grants activities, and is worthwhile being replicated with other faculty members.