Evaluation Goals

 

The goals of the Teaching Evaluation Initiative primarily focus on building on the Texas Tech teaching culture and history. Our effort is not unique and reflects a growing interest among universities nationwide to consider how we assess, value, and incentivize teaching excellence.
 
Our primary goal is to more broadly implement a three-voice model (peers, self, and students) of teaching assessment at Texas Tech University using multiple sources of input to measure teaching effectiveness.

The Teaching Quality Framework Initiative (National Science Foundation (DUE-1725959), the American Association of Universities, and the University of Colorado Boulder) frame the three-voice model in this way:

• Peer voice allows for instructor evaluations to be more holistic, as instructors are qualified to evaluate teaching elements such as the instructor’s content understanding and course goals. Additionally, peer observers who are involved in the education research community are qualified to evaluate if the instructor is using up-to-date instructional strategies.
• Faculty themselves are uniquely able to describe their justifications for teaching goals and course design, their efforts for professional development, the learning outcomes of their students, and their engagement with the scholarship of teaching.
• Students can provide feedback on areas such as engagement, clarity, and their satisfaction with the course. They can provide comparisons between courses on difficulty, time required for the course, as well as information about themselves such as their perceived efforts relative to other students or confidence with the content before taking the course. Lastly, they can demonstrate awareness of learning goals and objectives (e.g. critical thinking skills, mastery of the material, ability to work on a team, and engage in independent learning, etc.).

How we will achieve this goal? Our work began in 2020 and we originally planned for a 5-year implementation process. We primarily focused on tools and processes in the first three years of our project to establish a definition of teaching excellence, tools for self-evaluation and peer review, and to revise the student course feedback form (formerly the student course evaluation).

Through our collaboration with the DeLTA Project (National Science Foundation Improving Undergraduates STEM 18221023) at the University of Georgia, we are shifting our work to department level implementation through leadership action teams and catalyst action teams

Questions?

For questions, please contact Mitzi Ziegner or Suzanne Tapp.