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Research-intensive universities aim to conduct cutting-edge research while providing the knowledge and skills necessary to prepare students to excel in their respective fields. As student enrollments surge, many institutions have turned to hiring teaching-focused faculty. In the University of California (UC) system, there exists a unique position known as the Professor of Teaching (PoT). This position is tenure-eligible, and members are required to engage in classroom teaching, scholarly activities, and service responsibilities. To shed light on the background characteristics, roles and perceptions of the impact of teaching-focused faculty in research-intensive institutions, we collected survey data from STEM PoT faculty across the UC system. We employed a mixed methods approach, using descriptive and inferential statistics to analyze quantitative responses and thematic analysis to examine open-ended qualitative data. Our analysis shows that pre-tenure PoTs place greater emphasis on scholarly activities relative to their peers who have been in the role for longer. However, their training and the institutional resources provided may not align with expectations for scholarly activities. Additionally, we find that PoTs who engage in research perceive that they have a more significant impact on their colleagues’ teaching. This finding underscores the value of research, even for teaching-focused faculty. This study informs the evolving landscape of teaching-focused faculty within research-intensive universities and provides recommendations for administrators considering how to ensure that their institutions are fulfilling their educational mission. 

Past research on group work has primarily focused on promoting change through implementation of interventions designed to increase performance. Recently, however, education researchers have called for more descriptive analyses of group interactions. Through detailed qualitative analysis of recorded discussions, we studied the natural interactions of students during group work in the context of a biology laboratory course. We analyzed multiple interactions of 30 different groups as well as data from each of the 91 individual participants to characterize the ways students engage in discussion and how group dynamics promote or prevent meaningful discussion. Using a set of codes describing 15 unique behaviors, we determined that the most common behavior seen in student dialogue was analyzing data, followed by recalling information and repeating ideas. We also classified students into one of 10 different roles for each discussion, determined by their most common behaviors. We found that, although students cooperated with one another by exchanging information, they less frequently fully collaborated to explain their conclusions through the exchange of reasoning. Within this context, these findings show that students working in groups generally choose specific roles during discussions and focus on data analysis rather than constructing logical reasoning chains to explain their conclusions.