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The effect of a highly-structured faculty development program that focused on improving teaching skills and writing productivity through weekly individual sessions was studied with 16 social sciences faculty. Participants were alternatively assigned to one of four groups that emphasized development in teaching skills, writing productivity, or a combination of both. In the writing program, faculty contracted for a regimen of time management with a priority on brief, daily periods of undisrupted writing. In the teaching skills program, faculty began with a structured sequence of role-playing and were then evaluated using videotape feedback. The following teaching skills were assessed: postural and vocal relaxation, use of expressive gestures, and organization and enthusiasm in lecturing. At weekly meetings, participants completed the Scholarly Activities Rating Scale (SARS) in order to assess their involvement in and attitudes toward a wide range of scholarly activities assumed to be relevant to faculty development. Findings indicate that emphases on both writing and teaching produced clear improvements in dimensions such as teaching success, teaching/work eagerness, and burnout. Scholarly writing appeared to produce a broad range of self-rated improvements in scholarly activities. A SARS form is appended. (SW)

A study attempted to measure the effects of contingency management, conditions that essentially forced subjects to write, on their writing productivity and creative ideas. Subjects were 27 published college faculty with doctorates, divided into three groups of nine. The first or contingency group participated in a "baseline phase" during which they wrote on scheduled days only if they felt like it. At the end of this phase, the subjects established a daily writing output goal and contracted for a strong external contingency--a personal financial penalty for every day they did not meet that goal. The second or noncontingent group also participated in the baseline phase, after which they were just verbally encouraged to write during each scheduled writing day. The third or control group agreed to defer all but the absolutely necessary academic writing tasks until 10 weeks had passed. The writing output of all three groups was charted by the subjects. The results indicated that the contingency group produced a clearly higher level of written pages per day than did either of the other groups during the equivalent period. The introduction of instructions to write more appears to have produced a moderate increase over baseline levels in the noncontingent group. Subjects in the control group did not produce a substantial amount of nonacademic writing despite maintenance of graphs and logs. Contingency management of writing productivity also facilitated rather than impeded the appearance of creative ideas for writing. (HTH)