Assessing Faculty Work


Book Description

Today's faculty members, like other professionals, find themselves caught between the pursuit of individual gain and the common good. Society is increasingly demanding that faculty demonstrate social responsibility toward both the institution and the larger community. This book is a practical resource for fostering and assessing faculty achievements in all aspects of their work: teaching, research, practice, and citizenship. Larry A. Braskamp and John C. Ory show that the assessment process can and must be tied to faculty development, and they explain how collegial activity and continuous improvement are important to strong performance. They identify three major elements of faculty assessment - setting expectations, collecting and organizing evidence, and using evidence - and suggest several key goals for the assessment process. The authors also show how multiple perspectives enhance the credibility of assessment, and they describe sources of evidence, including faculty members themselves, faculty colleagues, students, and experts. Specific techniques used to collect evidence are provided, as well as summaries of research on the effectiveness of each procedure. - inner pocket




The Knowledge Factory


Book Description

Americans can't get a good education for love or money, argues Stanley Aronowitz in this groundbreaking look at the structure and curriculum of higher education. Moving beyond the canon wars begun in Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, Aronowitz offers a vision for true higher learning that places a well-rounded education back at the center of the university's mission.




Evaluating and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics


Book Description

Economic, academic, and social forces are causing undergraduate schools to start a fresh examination of teaching effectiveness. Administrators face the complex task of developing equitable, predictable ways to evaluate, encourage, and reward good teaching in science, math, engineering, and technology. Evaluating, and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics offers a vision for systematic evaluation of teaching practices and academic programs, with recommendations to the various stakeholders in higher education about how to achieve change. What is good undergraduate teaching? This book discusses how to evaluate undergraduate teaching of science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and what characterizes effective teaching in these fields. Why has it been difficult for colleges and universities to address the question of teaching effectiveness? The committee explores the implications of differences between the research and teaching cultures-and how practices in rewarding researchers could be transferred to the teaching enterprise. How should administrators approach the evaluation of individual faculty members? And how should evaluation results be used? The committee discusses methodologies, offers practical guidelines, and points out pitfalls. Evaluating, and Improving Undergraduate Teaching in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics provides a blueprint for institutions ready to build effective evaluation programs for teaching in science fields.




Reflective Faculty Evaluation


Book Description

John A. Centra provides faculty members, administrators, and faculty development specialists with the up-to-date approaches they need to evaluate and improve teaching. He underscores the importance of active methods of teaching and the need to evaluate those methods in less traditional ways. He discusses the value and proper use of self-reports and portfolios, and examines better ways to involve colleagues in evaluating and improving teaching.




Faculty Development and Student Learning


Book Description

Colleges and universities across the US have created special initiatives to promote faculty development, but to date there has been little research to determine whether such programs have an impact on students' learning. Faculty Development and Student Learning reports the results of a multi-year study undertaken by faculty at Carleton College and Washington State University to assess how students' learning is affected by faculty members' efforts to become better teachers. Extending recent research in the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) to assessment of faculty development and its effectiveness, the authors show that faculty participation in professional development activities positively affects classroom pedagogy, student learning, and the overall culture of teaching and learning in a college or university.




Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education: A Guide for Teachers


Book Description

Teachers spend much of their time on assessment, yet many higher education teachers have received minimal guidance on assessment design and marking. This means assessment can often be a source of stress and frustration. Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education aims to solve these problems. Offering a concise overview of assessment theory and practice, this guide provides teachers with the help they need.




Assessing Teacher Effectiveness


Book Description

How can we really evaluate teacher effectiveness? Systems of teacher appraisal and evaluation are being created across the world in order to monitor and assess teacher performance. But do the models used really give a fair evaluation? Based on international research, the authors argue that teacher effectiveness is too narrowly conceptualised and methods of measuring it are not attuned to the real contexts in which teachers work. They propose a model of differential teacher effectiveness which takes into account that: * teachers may be more effective with some categories of students than with others * teachers may be more effective with some teaching contexts than others * teachers may be more effective with some subjects or components than with others. Building on and developing previous research on models of teacher effectiveness and current theories, the authors open up possible new debates which will be of interest to academics and researchers working in this area throughout the world.







Learning Assessment Techniques


Book Description

50 Techniques for Engaging Students and Assessing Learning in College Courses Do you want to: Know what and how well your students are learning? Promote active learning in ways that readily integrate assessment? Gather information that can help make grading more systematic and streamlined? Efficiently collect solid learning outcomes data for institutional assessment? Provide evidence of your teaching effectiveness for promotion and tenure review? Learning Assessment Techniques provides 50 easy-to-implement active learning techniques that gauge student learning across academic disciplines and learning environments. Using Fink's Taxonomy of Significant Learning as its organizational framework, it embeds assessment within active learning activities. Each technique features: purpose and use, key learning goals, step-by-step implementation, online adaptation, analysis and reporting, concrete examples in both on-site and online environments, and key references—all in an easy-to-follow format. The book includes an all-new Learning Goals Inventory, as well as more than 35 customizable assessment rubrics, to help teachers determine significant learning goals and appropriate techniques. Readers will also gain access to downloadable supplements, including a worksheet to guide teachers through the six steps of the Learning Assessment Techniques planning and implementation cycle. College teachers today are under increased pressure to teach effectively and provide evidence of what, and how well, students are learning. An invaluable asset for college teachers of any subject, Learning Assessment Techniques provides a practical framework for seamlessly integrating teaching, learning, and assessment.




Assessing the Online Learner


Book Description

Written by Rena M. Palloff and Keith Pratt, experts in the field of online teaching and learning, this hands-on resource helps higher education professionals understand the fundamentals of effective online assessment. It offers guidance for designing and implementing creative assessment practices tied directly to course activities to measure student learning. The book is filled with illustrative case studies, authentic assessments based in real-life application of concepts, and collaborative activities that assess the quality of student learning rather than relying on the traditional methods of measuring the amount of information retained.