Boyer's Model of Scholarship

Boyer's model of scholarship is an academic model advocating the expansion of the traditional definition of scholarship and research into four types, introduced in 1990 by Ernest Boyer. Boyer argued that traditional research, the scholarship of discovery, had long been the center of academic life and crucial to institutional advancement, but needed to be broadened to include the social and environmental challenges beyond the campus and the realities of contemporary life, reflecting his wider goal of redefining the research mission of universities. He proposed four categories: the scholarship of discovery, original research that advances knowledge; the scholarship of integration, synthesis of information across disciplines, topics or time; the scholarship of application, later also called the scholarship of engagement, which goes beyond a faculty member's service duties to apply disciplinary expertise with results that can be shared with and evaluated by peers; and the scholarship of teaching and learning, the systematic study of teaching and learning processes, which differs from scholarly teaching in that its work must be made public, subjected to peer review and critique, and be reproducible and extensible by other scholars. Boyer's model has since been embraced widely across academia, with occasional refinement for specific disciplines.