WINTER 2012 - National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and ...

Patricia Shields, Nandhini Rangarajan, and Lewis Stewart
Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page
and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of
the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Although this approach provides some assurance about the quality of Google
Scholar as an academic search engine, more research needs to be done about the
potential ethical dilemmas that the Internet in general, and search engines in
particular, might pose for public administration scholars trying to enhance the
visibility of their work.
CONCLUSION
As Levin, Burbules, and Bruce (2005, p. 39) observe:
Most student work has no value beyond its demonstration of student
learning which is captured in a grade. Typically the student work itself
is discarded after being evaluated and only the evaluation is saved. The
evaluation is typically a drastically reduced representation of the work
which has no value beyond the educational assessment.
Quality student research is an underused resource that needs to find its
rightful place in the knowledge realm. The insights from this study have
implications for how public administration education, practice, and research
can benefit from accessibility of good-quality student research on institutional
digital repositories.
From the perspective of public administration education, the high download
rates associated with Texas State University ARPs have implications for (a)
enhancing the visibility of the MPA program among scholars and practitioners;
(b) enhancing transparency of MPA capstone projects; (c) attracting future
students from domestic as well as international contexts; and (d) enhancing job
placement and research prospects for graduates of the program. The pedagogical
experience is enhanced by the availability of student capstone papers on digital
repositories that enables instructors to show examples of research questions,
conceptual frameworks, and research methods used. Moreover, the Texas State
University MPA program regularly invites past students to talk about their
experience working on capstone papers and to provide answers, advice, and
assurance to current students, thus facilitating the creation of a community of
students engaged in academic dialogue. Finally, the knowledge that their paper
will be made available to the world via e-commons motivates students in two
specific ways. On the one hand, they want to avoid embarrassment; on the other
hand, they view the wide accessibility of e-commons as an opportunity to make a
difference.
From the practitioner’s perspective, full-text versions of ARPs serve as
important informational sources on various policy/administration issues. At least
176 Journal of Public Affairs Education