Methods
I collected email addresses of 2000 faculty with field-based
specializations in applied and basic biological, environmental, and
geophysical science using departmental websites of a non-random
selection of 200 public and private research universities,
undergraduate-serving institutions, and community colleges located in
the United States. The prospective respondents represented a non-random
but wide range of institution types, disciplines, and geography. I then
randomly selected an unstratified sample of 1000 faculty for recruitment
into the survey, and contacted them via email between April 15 and April
25, 2020 (contact email details are in Supporting Information). A
follow-up email was sent 5 days later to non-respondents. A unique link
to the online survey was also emailed to several discipline- and
interest-specific mailing lists. The survey period closed May 10, 2020.
The survey was administered using the web platform SurveyMonkey
(SurveyMonkey 2020). The survey process included an informed consent
statement, and consisted of 22 questions, not counting an informed
consent acceptance and additional communication opt-in (informed
consent, complete survey questions, and response options are reported in
Supporting Information). Respondents were notified that their individual
responses were private, and individually-identifiable survey data were
anonymized and separated from survey responses before storage and
analysis. Standard psychometric principles were not used in the creation
of all survey questions given the backgrounds of the prospective
respondent pool, and my intent to use these data in this purely
descriptive or inductive study. Five of the 22 questions interrogated
the respondent’s current teaching and plans to teach courses,
institutional and positional characteristics, and specific discipline.
The remaining 17 questions interrogated the instructor’s typical field
instruction, and their perception of impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic
and teaching modality shifts on typical field instruction (Supporting
Information). Respondents were informed that they could opt out at any
time, and a final submission was required for their results to be
recorded. One survey response was eliminated because it contained
numerous extraneous and perhaps poorly-intentioned responses. The
remaining surveys were used to create simple descriptive statistics, and
summary figures and tables. Not all respondents answered all questions,
and thus sample sizes varied among questions are reported on a
question-by-question basis. Aggregated and anonymized data are reported
in Supporting Information. Individual responses to free response items
are not shown as some contained potentially individually-identifiable
information, and informed consent was not obtained from subjects to use
direct quotations of their responses. The only person with access to
non-anonymized and non-aggregated data was DC Barton. The survey and
data-handling protocol was approved by the Humboldt State University
Institutional Review Board for the Protection of Human Subjects (IRB
#19-164) in April 2020.