Scot W. McNary Ph.D.

Associate Professor

Department of Educational Technology and Literacy

College of Education

Detailed Supporting Statement: Service

Profession

Reviewing. I am a member of the Editorial Board for Child Abuse and Neglect, and have

been since prior to coming to Towson. I have reviewed over 32 manuscripts for them in the

review period. Last year. I have been an ad-hoc editor for several other journals including

Computers in the Schools, Journal of General Internal Medicine, Journal of Research on

Adolescence, Journal of International Online Learning, and The Teacher Educator. I reviewed

presentations until 2016 for APA Division 5 for the APA conference and the AERA IT SIG .

Speaking. I gave annual invited addresses to the APA Minority Research Fellows during

the Minority Fellowship Program each July during the review period. After my invited address I

conduct a half-day of consultation with between two and six Fellows in formal meetings on the

afternoon of the presentation.

University

Committees. In the Summer of 2014 I began service on the Institutional Review Board. I

completed a three-year term on the committee and agreed to serve another term. I have

completed reviews of at least 80 projects in the review period. I consulted with three other

faculty from the university on research projects since 2013.

 College

Committees. I have been on the COE Scholarships Committee since Fall 2015. The

committee meets every year to award foundation grants to undergraduate and graduate students

who meet criteria for need and other considerations. There are between 60-130 applications to

review each year. In 2016 I was asked to sit on the Merit Task Force for the college. The

committee met for a year and made recommendations for updating tenure-track and lecturer

merit award criteria.

Rebecca Shargel and I co-facilitate a Professional Learning Community of faculty who

are interested in feedback on writing projects. These are attached to the college-wide meetings

held once per month. In the review period we have met at least three times per year.

Faculty Consultation. I consult with College faculty on their research projects. Since

2013 I have consulted with 21 different COE faculty members for a total of 388 hours.

Department

Committees. I am on both the Admissions Committee (2013-present), and Doctoral

Program Committee (2013-present), and Department P&T committee (2013-present). I was chair

of the Department Merit Committee from 2013-2017.

Student Advising. Although this is summarized more completely under the Teaching

section, doctoral and master’s student consultation are part of my role as faculty at Towson

University. Since 2013, this has included doctoral students for whom I am a committee member

(n = 23), and also doctoral students (n = 5) for whom I am not (all doctoral student consultation
= 615 hours), and M.Ed. students who elect to pursue an Action Research Project in their

capstone course (2 students, 10 hours).

 Teaching Philosophy

The students who take my courses are adults and typically education professionals with

full-time careers, and family obligations. It is rare to have a student in class who is a full-time

student. This means the students are adult learners and I try to accommodate needs and wishes of

these students as I plan my courses and interact with them in class. First, I try to make as much

of what I teach relevant to their experience as possible by providing real-world examples, and

providing lots of opportunity for interaction with me and classmates. Second, I believe in

providing case-like problems (in the doctoral program classes) and individual projects (in

Master’s program classes) to allow for individuality in learning and demonstration of knowledge.

I have more recently begun to introduce simulations into graduate level coursework to enhance

individuality of learning and trial and error. Third, I provide considerable feedback and multiple

opportunities to redo assignments because I believe it promotes mastery learning, a more

appropriate method of grading for self-motivated students. Finally, for graduate students, but

especially for doctoral students, I believe presenting controversial points of view on

methodology and research design develops fluency, but also a critical perspective, necessary for

the independent researcher.

 Scholarship Artifact

There are several reasons to showcase this article as an example of scholarship. First, I

appreciate how our work flowed naturally from a qualitative study before I became involved into

a mixed-method study after I began work with Drs. McQuitty and Ballock. Researchers who

specialize in mixed-methods design (e.g., Cresswell J.W. & Plano-Clark V.L. (2018). Designing

and Conducting Mixed-method Research, Sage) and others might call this a QUAL>quan design

(exploratory sequential), in which the qualitative analysis preceded and was primary to the

quantitative data analysis. Drs. McQuitty and Ballock explored their open- and axial coding as

far as they felt they could, but yet still felt there was more to learn from the data. Dr. McQuitty

approached me for ideas how to look at their data in a quantitative way. They wanted to see how

all of their coding categories of student noticing collectively hung together. In this way, we could

make maximal use of something humans do well- make meaning from socially mediated events-

but also make maximal use of what computer algorithms do best, which is to efficiently find

patterns in multivariate space. In keeping with mixed-method practice, we took the patterns

discerned from the quantitative analysis back to the transcripts and used cases to determine that

the quantitative findings made sense. In our case, the qualitative data was the standard and the

quantitative analysis was the tool compared to the standard.

Second, I enjoyed how this stretched me to learn about a quantitative method (Multiple

Correspondence Analysis) I had been playing with and was curious about. There is nothing like a

real problem in statistics to drive discovery. I need to do my homework, practice in the method

with sample problems, and then I felt able to apply it to the noticing data.
 Third, the iterative process we went through was labor-intensive but so very much like

how we solve problems in real life: we analyze, then interpret, and then test our interpretations

against our data, then cycle back to perhaps re-code the data, re-analyze, re-interpret, and repeat

again. The feeling of anticipation when eagerly poring over the tabular findings and graphical

displays for what new insight might be revealed was stimulating. On a typical afternoon, I would

run some analyses, share them with Drs. McQuitty and Ballock to see if they made sense, then

incorporate their feedback into a new round of analyses. We had all agreed before beginning that

the quantitative results had to made sense before we used them. Because the qualitative analyses

preceded and were conceptually prioritized over the quantitative analysis, we used the qualitative

results as the standard by which meaningfulness of the quantitative results were judged. But we

also found that the quantitative findings caused Drs. McQuitty and Ballock to look back at their

transcripts and coding scheme with fresh eyes. Their subsequent recoding of the data led to

another round of quantitative analyses. There were at least two rounds of re-coding and re-

analysis like this. In the end, the qualitative and the quantitative analyses were both informative

of, and informed by, the other. If there were a path forward I could point to for our colleagues

and our students about how to do mixed-methods research, I'd give this as an example. Both

approaches led to mutually reinforcing interpretations.

 Fourth, I think we did a very nice job of not making our paper a tutorial on Multiple

Correspondence Analysis. When one writes about a method that is not commonly used in a

journal, there is some responsibility to inform the reader about what one is are doing. The risk of

writing clearly about methods is that it can overwhelm the substantive content of the paper,

which is the real focus. I believe we were clear enough in our description that the method was

not swept under the rug, but not so wordy that the focus on the results of the noticing research

were diluted. I am proud of our collaboration.

Mary Neville with The Journal of Teacher Education interviewed us for the JTE Insider

podcast. The link to that interview is here:

https://edwp.educ.msu.edu/jte-insider/2018/podcast-interview-ballock-mcquitty-mcnary/