Research Terms and Information

Research and scholarship at King's is generally defined as knowledge or skill gained by advanced study as recognized by one's academic peers and shared among scholars, professional colleagues, and the general public.

All types of scholarship at King's are marked by several key attributes:

• all scholarship is done out of a faithful and loving response to God and each other
• all scholarship is marked by a sincere desire to understand and promote what is true
• all scholarship demonstrates the lordship of Christ in all areas of creation
• all scholarship is intended to equip and provide empowering insight to God's people

Research and scholarship at King's implies an authentic engagement of the scholar with an appropriate community and a commitment to making public one's scholarship in ways that serve that community. No one area of scholarship is viewed as more important than another. All are seen as ways of making manifest the gifts given by God to each other.

King's uses a four-fold characterization of scholarship as proposed by Ernest Boyer (1990) with some modifications. All four as seen as equally valid and important.

Discovery: Research that contributes to basic knowledge within a particular field or fields. 'Discovery' scholarship should result in creating new knowledge (e.g. directions for research, theory building, etc.) or should place previous knowledge within a new context.
Discovery research asks, "what is to be known and what is yet to be found?"

Integration: Scholarship that makes connections between disciplines, giving meaning to isolated facts and putting them into perspective. It also means interpretation, such as fitting one's own research into larger intellectual patterns.
Integration scholarship asks, "what do these findings mean?

Application: This research asks how knowledge can be applied to problems. In many ways this is the scholarship of service in the sense that these activities are tied directly to one's special field of knowledge and relate to, and flow out of, this professional activity. Application research is problem oriented, as opposed to discipline oriented.

Pedagogy: Seeks to improve the teaching of others. Pedagogy is integrating the experience of teaching with the scholarship of research. It is the ongoing and cumulative intellectual inquiry, through systematic observations and ongoing investigations into the nature of learning and the impact of teaching upon it. Pedagogy is different from good teaching as it involves intentional inquiry about teaching and sharing findings with peers internally and externally.