A COMPENDIUM OF SCALES for use in the SCHOLARSHIP OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

Chapter 3: Selecting the Right Scale: An Editor’s Perspective
Andrew N. Christopher
Albion College
Before I begin to offer my perspectives on selecting the appropriate scale for a research project,
it is important that I share some of my academic background because it clearly colors my views
in this chapter. In graduate school, I was in a program in which the graduate students in social
psychology interacted regularly with graduate students in counseling psychology, cognitive
psychology, and neuroscience. Because it was commonplace for such interactions to occur, I
figured that was the way researchers in different areas worked; that is, they frequently
interacted with each other. Indeed, 16 years after receiving my Ph.D., my best friends from
graduate school with whom I still work are from areas of training different than mine. I have
learned during the past 16 years that such “cross-area” communication is in fact not as normal
as I perceived it to be. Since completing graduate school, I have taught at a small liberal arts
college in which faculty in all disciplines regularly interact on scholarly work related to both
teaching and research. Some of the best course material I have developed for my
industrial/organizational (I/O) psychology class originated from numerous discussions with a
colleague from my college’s history department. Some of my own research focuses on
individual differences, so it is rooted strongly in a combination of I/O and personality, both of
which rely heavily on the use of scales, a practice that is increasingly being scrutinized by
people in both areas. With this background in mind, please allow me to provide my insights into
selecting the right scale for a research project.
A (Needlessly) Great Divide
It is not uncommon for there to be great divides between researchers in seemingly related
areas of research. For example, it might make intuitive sense for researchers in personnel
selection and performance evaluation to collaborate, particularly on applied types of projects.
Having worked in both areas, I have been surprised how little collaboration or even simply
communication there is between researchers on each side of this process in both academic and
applied settings. 1
Within the realm of educational-type research, Daniel and Chew (2013) drew a distinction
between the learning sciences and SoTL, the former of which has “The goal….to better
understand the cognitive and social processes that result in the most effective learning, and to
use this knowledge to redesign classrooms and other learning environments so that people
learn more deeply and more effectively” (Sawyer, 2006, p. xi). Its emphasis is on the application
of research in basic areas of psychology, such as personality and cognitive, to educational
settings. For example, Christopher, Furnham, Batey, Martin, Koenig, and Doty (2010) examined
how work values may be compensatory mechanisms for lower levels of general intelligence.
Certainly, such work could be applicable to almost any educational setting. In contrast to the
learning sciences, much SoTL work “…typically reports the success of particular methods in a
particular context and within a particular level of a specific discipline” (Daniel & Chew, 2013, p.
365). Indeed, SoTL tends to be quite specific in its focus and generalizability of its results. For
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