State Policies to Improve Undergraduate Teaching
Although many individual colleges and universities are giving renewed attention to undergraduate instruction, many state legislatures remain concerned about institutional commitment to teaching. They have targeted faculty work and faculty productivity, especially with respect to teaching. Legislative concern about improving instruction has taken different forms in different states. Recently enacted state policies include mandated post-tenure review in Florida (Haworth, 1996), the faculty workload mandate in Ohio that requires faculty to increase the time spent on teaching (Cage, 1995), more stringent workload reporting requirements in Maryland (Presley & Engelbride, 1998), and policies relating institutional funding to performance indicators in Tennessee, South Carolina, and several other states (Carnevale, Johnson, & Edwards, 1998). Different policies targeting teaching and learning are likely to have varying effects, especially as the policies are mediated through very different types of twoand four-year institutional environments (Jones & Ewell, 1993). The purpose of this study is to examine the effects of two state policies with the same goal: improving undergraduate instruction and learning. Most previous case study research focused primarily on the implementation of a single policy in a single institution or type of institution within a single state. For example, recently scholars analyzed