Evaluating Teaching Performance
Although all Colleges and Departments have teaching evaluation procedures in place, the Compensation Committee recommends that each College review dimensions of teaching performance to ensure that they are consistent with contemporary research on teaching effectiveness. In particular, the committee recognizes that some Colleges continue to rely heavily on student evaluation instruments that are both contaminated and deficient measures of teaching effectiveness. Our recommendation for defining teaching roles and teaching effectiveness is taken from Raoul A. Arreola’s Developing a Comprehensive Faculty Evaluation System (2000). Arreola’s book provides an excellent approach to evaluating teaching effectiveness. He suggests the following dimensions of teaching, along with suitable sources for gathering information about that dimension:
- Instructional Delivery Skills: This includes the instructor’s ability to clearly communicate information and concepts, and the ability to facilitate learning. In general, this is a student-reaction measure that can be measured appropriately through student evaluation items.
- Instructional Design Skills: This is the set of technical skills involved in designing, sequencing, and presenting experiences that induce student learning, and in developing tools for assessing learning outcomes. About 25% of this dimension can be assessed based on student reactions to questions relating to the relationship between course objectives and test and assignment design and difficulty. Most of this dimension, the remaining 75%, should come from peer assessment of course content, including syllabus, assignments, exams, grade distributions, etc.
- Content Expertise: This is defined as the body of skills, knowledge, and competencies specific to the discipline. Students are not competent to assess this dimension and student evaluation forms should not include these types of questions. This dimension should be assessed through peer and department head review.
- Course Management: This relates to course administration, including the timely grading and returning of exams and assignments and the bureaucratic management of course grades and forms. This can be assessed through items on student evaluations and by the department head.
The Compensation Committee recommends that all units review their policies regarding the assessment of teaching to ensure consistency with these performance dimensions and criteria. Each College or Department should set specific weights for each of the four dimensions. According to Arreola, the evaluation of teaching effectiveness should not weigh student evaluation results more than 35-40% of the overall rating. The evaluation results should provide separate scores on each of the four dimensions of teaching performance described above for developmental purposes, and a composite teaching rating should be obtained using the specific dimension weights. The committee recommends that Colleges or Departments that currently use evaluation methods which do not recognize these separate dimensions consider revising their methods to be consistent with this framework.
Evaluating Scholarship/Research/Creative Activities
The current Faculty Handbook, using a taxonomy developed by Ernest L. Boyer, makes distinctions among Scholarship of Discovery, Scholarship of Integration and Application, and Scholarship of Teaching. This taxonomy has been offered as an alternative to the traditional teaching/research/service dimensions. The Compensation Committee made no attempt to incorporate Boyer formally into our recommendations; however, in Departments that have found the Boyer model useful, the performance criteria for evaluating teaching, research, and service may reflect the Boyer framework as long as the criteria are also consistent with College and University expectations.
Evaluating Service
Each faculty member is expected to make professional contributions through service as one of the requirements for reappointment, promotion and tenure. Service activities will also be evaluated for purposes of establishing performance ratings. The Faculty Handbook provides a taxonomy of service activity that forms the basis for promotion and tenure criteria in Section 2.3.1.3. In addition, the Faculty Senate’s 1996 Faculty Roles and Rewards document described categories of service activities based on the Boyer model: Service as Scholarship and Service as Citizenship. The possibility for confusion exists. Performance criteria for the service dimension should be clarified within each College or Department consistent with the University mission, the Faculty Handbook, and the specific needs and values of that unit. Service criteria should continue to be established based on the degree of one’s contribution to his or her profession, the community, the University, the College, and the Department.