Planning Assessment of Teaching
The Provost’s Advisory Council on Instructional Excellence (ACIE) created a set of recommendations to expand and improve assessment of teaching effectiveness at Pitt, including the recommendation that academic units should create assessment of teaching plans. The recommendations were discussed by Council of Deans on Jan. 10, 2020 and endorsed on Jan. 30, 2020, discussed and shared with the Senate Educational Policies Committee on May 18, 2020, and were accepted by the Faculty Assembly at the Nov. 4, 2020 meeting. See the Provost’s Office Feb. 16, 2021 memo on assessment of teaching. Academic units submitted assessment of teaching plans in 2021.
Tools and Resources for Creating an Assessment of Teaching Plan
ACIE recommendations indicate that summative evaluations of teaching (e.g. annual review, promotion and tenure evaluations) should draw from multiple sources, listed below. Click on the links to access readings, resources, and examples of assessment of teaching methods.
- Peer review
- Student feedback
- Representative teaching materials and course artifacts
- Self-assessment
These measures can be evaluated holistically together in teaching portfolios.
Student Opinion of Teaching Survey Tools and Resources
ACIE recommendations also indicate that academic units, with support from the Provost’s Office, should raise faculty awareness of the effective use of student input and the potential biases in student opinion of teaching surveys, help faculty learn how to increase student response rates to surveys, and help faculty learn how to raise students’ awareness of the value of their opinions on course revision and improvement.
The University of Kansas has created a comprehensive overview of research on use of student surveys to evaluate teaching. This information may assist academic units with communicating to faculty about teaching survey use, interpretation, and how bias may affect results.
Best Practices for Using Student Opinion of Teaching Surveys Video Series
See the Office of Measurement and Evaluation of Teaching (OMET) website for additional information. For individualized assistance, contact OMET.
Resources and Readings
- The Association of American Universities (AAU) has documented national assessment of teaching practices, particularly in STEM disciplines, for the past several years. This matrix lists summative assessment of teaching practices at AAU institutions (PDF – 268KB). These reports, Searching for Better Approaches: Effective Evaluation of Teaching and Learning in STEM (2014) (PDF – 803KB) and Aligning Practice to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities (2016) (PDF – 235 KB), detail the AAU’s efforts.
- TEval is a website documenting an educational research project by faculty from higher education institutions nation-wide to “advance educational practices by creating, aligning and sustaining effective evaluation strategies that promote and use evidence-based instructional strategies and [. . .] simultaneously seek to advance understanding of the institutional change process by studying the adoption and integration of new approaches to evaluating teaching.”
-
This book presents creating a system for faculty evaluation as a step-by-step process, starting with using exemplars to define and describe measures of faculty work to piloting the system. Although it does not solely focus on teaching, the book includes information, samples, and resources on assessing teaching effectiveness.
-
Benton and Young describe key measures to use in comprehensive evaluation of teaching: student feedback, instructor self-assessment, and review conducted by colleagues and administrators.
-
Berk offers a concise overview and comparison of various methods of assessment of teaching.
-
This review of 26 studies examined assessment of faculty assessment, with particular attention to student feedback and outcomes, at European universities.
Psychology Department
Highlights: The Psychology Department has developed a comprehensive framework for improvement-based teaching assessment which includes an internally-developed teaching portfolio rubric and observation protocol, as well as a toolkit of research on developing research-based teaching skills, inclusive teaching strategies, and addressing barriers to inclusive teaching.
Katz Graduate School of Business/College of Business Administration
Highlights: Katz/CBA has integrated assessment of teaching with curricular reform efforts and has developed robust faculty development programs, including a graduate student teaching training program and peer-to-peer mentoring, to drive improvement of teaching. Katz/CBA has also developed a school-wide communication campaign and implemented strategies to increase students’ OMET teaching survey response rates.
School of Dental Medicine
Highlights: The School of Dental Medicine’s program-specific approach integrates assessment of teaching with curricular review and assessment of student learning to maximize the efficiency of data collection and use. Dental Medicine has also expanded the collection of student feedback to include alumni surveys and assessment of mentoring. Finally, as a school that has been performing robust assessment of teaching for six years, Dental Medicine has iteratively improved assessment practices regularly using faculty feedback.
School of Education
Highlights: The School of Education has aligned its definition of teaching effectiveness and assessment of teaching practices with the school’s mission, which emphasizes equity, justice, and anti-racism. The School of Education has designed an assessment of teaching process that promotes reflection while allowing faculty the flexibility to determine which sources of evidence best demonstrate the quality of their teaching. The school has also revised OMET student opinion of teaching survey questions to better capture student feedback on equitable and inclusive teaching practices.
Swanson School of Engineering
Highlights: The School of Engineering has developed a system that links assessment of teaching with faculty development. In addition to its robust workshop offerings, the school has created teaching and mentoring bootcamps, a session focusing on reflection and communicating about teaching work in faculty evaluation processes, and a badging system for teaching skill sets like active learning and teaching technology.
School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences
Highlights: The School of Health and Rehabilitation began the process of revising assessment of teaching by composing OMET student opinion of teaching questions that align with their school’s definition of teaching effectiveness. Part of this involved conducting student focus groups to determine how students interpreted draft questions and which questions they perceived as most useful. Engaging students in assessment of teaching planning gives students the opportunity to help shape a process or tool that is ultimately intended to help improve their learning experiences.
In 2024, SHRS published a statement detailing who receives access to faculty OMET results to ensure transparency of faculty evaluation procedures [PDF – 161KB].
School of Pharmacy
Highlights: The School of Pharmacy is conducting meta assessment on a pilot of two potential faculty peer review processes, a peer observation and a “Classroom Clinic,” to determine which method has the greatest impact and which faculty prefer. The meta assessment engages faculty in the process of selecting assessment methods and allows the school to make a data-informed decision about which of the two methods to use moving forward.
The Classroom Clinic is a unique way to conduct peer review because it involves faculty giving short teaching demonstrations to colleagues, then discuss and receive feedback on their demonstrations. In addition to creating a forum to demonstrate best practices or receive feedback on a newly planned teaching strategy, the Classroom Clinic could help sustain informal peer teaching mentoring and discussions.
- NILOA’s Equity in Assessment Resources includes National Institute of Learning Outcomes Assessment occasional papers, action steps, case studies, and resources on conducting assessment equitably. Although these resources address student learning outcomes assessment, many of the ideas and actions outlined can be applied to assessment of teaching as well.
- Inclusified Teaching Evaluation, a Teaching in Higher Ed podcast featuring Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan touches on topics related to the importance of holistic evaluation of teaching and how to evaluate teaching equitably and inclusively.
- The Inclusive Excellence Teaching and Service Evaluation toolkit was developed to help universities develop faculty evaluation tools and processes for assessing the AAC&U’s concept of inclusive excellence in teaching and service. The toolkit includes sample self and peer evaluation forms, policy language, and considerations for faculty at different ranks/appointments.
- The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Resources on Transforming STEM Teaching Evaluation in Higher Education contains videos from a 2021 plenary, as well as resources on changing campus culture, using multiple measures to assess teaching, and incorporating student voices.
- Costantinou, C. & Wijnen-Meijer, M. (2022). Student evaluations of teaching and the development of a comprehensive measure of teaching effectiveness for medical schools. BMC Medical Education, 22(1)
- Krishnan, S. Gehrtz, J., Lemons, P. P., Dolan, E. L., Brickman, P., & Andrews, T. C. (2022). Guides to advance teaching evaluation (GATEs): A resource for STEM departments planning robust and equitable evaluation practices. CBE Life Sciences Education, 21(3).