Boyer widened what counts as scholarship, and rewards have lagged behind
Academic debate often sets teaching against research, as if staff had to choose between them. Boyer (1990) showed that scholarship takes several forms that all call for rigour, so the useful question is which forms serve your context and how your institution values them.
Boyer’s model of scholarship
One-sentence definition: Boyer’s model of scholarship is a framework identifying four distinct but overlapping forms of scholarship that together make up academic practice: discovery, integration, application, and teaching.
Boyer’s contribution was to legitimise what many academics already did. By 1990, discovery (traditional research) had come to be treated as the only form that counted as “real” scholarship. Everything else, from synthesising knowledge across fields to applying expertise to real-world problems and studying teaching practice, was classed as service or teaching and ranked below research. Boyer asked what would change if these were all treated as forms of scholarship, each requiring rigour and systematic inquiry.
The four forms
Scholarship of discovery is what most people mean by research: original investigation seeking new knowledge.
Scholarship of integration puts isolated facts into context, makes connections across disciplines, interprets findings in broader frameworks. Literature reviews, theoretical syntheses, and interdisciplinary work belong here, as scholarly contributions in their own right that take deep expertise to do well.
Scholarship of application applies disciplinary expertise to consequential problems beyond the academy, with results that can be shared and evaluated by peers. What separates it from service is method: it brings scholarly methods to real-world problems and produces knowledge that advances both practice and theory.
Scholarship of teaching, now usually called the scholarship of teaching and learning, involves systematic study of teaching and learning processes. It covers inquiry into how learning happens, which pedagogies work in which contexts, and how students develop expertise. This legitimises educational scholarship as research rather than relegating it to service.
The line between good teaching and the scholarship of teaching is the one health professions educators most often find hard to draw. A pharmacy lecturer who redesigns a simulated dispensing session, and sees students make fewer errors, is teaching well. When they frame the redesign as a question, gather evidence on whether it worked, and publish it where other educators can critique and build on it, the same work becomes scholarship. That is the test Lee Shulman proposed for separating the two: the work has to be public, open to peer review, and something others can build on (Glassick, 2000).
Expanding what counts as scholarship
The model addresses a persistent dysfunction in academia: we claim to value both teaching and research, then structure rewards almost entirely around traditional discovery. This creates perverse incentives: researchers who’d rather teach feel pressured to publish, teachers who’d rather integrate knowledge across fields get evaluated on discovery alone, practitioners applying expertise to consequential problems find their work doesn’t “count”.
Boyer located the problem in how narrowly scholarship had been defined, and left the value of research where it was. A broader definition makes room for several forms of contribution, all of them rigorous and all of them worth recognising.
In practice, that means reward systems that reflect this diversity, ways besides publication counts to evaluate scholarly performance, and an acceptance that the balance among the four forms will rightly differ by discipline, type of institution, and career stage.
Recognition without reward
Scholarship Reconsidered didn’t address quality: naming four forms of scholarship says nothing about telling good work from mediocre work in any of them. Its follow-up, Scholarship Assessed (Glassick et al., 1997), answered that with six standards that apply to all four forms: clear goals, adequate preparation, appropriate methods, significant results, effective presentation, and reflective critique. The model also doesn’t solve the structural problem: even if we accept that integration, application, and teaching are scholarship, promotion panels still reward discovery above the other three.
The question that Boyer raised but couldn’t answer: how do we create reward structures that value multiple forms of scholarship? That challenge remains largely unaddressed more than thirty-five years later.
Sources
- Boyer, E. L. (1990). Scholarship reconsidered: Priorities of the professoriate. Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.
- Glassick, C. E., Huber, M. T., & Maeroff, G. I. (1997). Scholarship assessed: Evaluation of the professoriate. Jossey-Bass.
- Glassick, C. E. (2000). Boyer’s expanded definitions of scholarship, the standards for assessing scholarship, and the elusiveness of the scholarship of teaching. Academic Medicine, 75(9), 877–880. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001888-200009000-00007
Notes
Boyer’s four categories aren’t equally developed across disciplines. Scientific fields have clearer traditions of application scholarship (engineering, clinical medicine). Humanities disciplines often struggle to fit their public-facing work into Boyer’s framework—is public scholarship integration, application, or something else entirely?