Deans, Directors, Chairs

Deans, chairs, directors, and department heads have various avenues through which to review faculty evaluations: they may review faculty reports, question means analyses, or response rate reports for specific semesters by logging into the IDEA review site; they may review Unit Summary Reports (USRs); and they may review faculty-provided evaluation data in teaching portfolios.

In addition to reviewing the reports described here, deans, chairs, directors, and department heads will also have available for review evaluation data provided by faculty in their teaching portfolios. See the Review Committees page for more information.

Logging into IDEA

Deans, directors, and chairs have both a faculty login site (where they can find their own evaluations and results) and a review login site (where they can find summary reports for their units). To access the review site, use the following link:

Login Page for Deans, Directors, and Chairs (campuslabs.com) (use FDU email and password)

Selecting Reports for Review

After logging into IDEA, you can select to view four different reports, as summarized below. Note that for each report, you need to use the drop-down fields to select the semester and the evaluation instrument (e.g., Diagnostic Feedback, Teaching Essentials, Learning Essentials) that you want to review.

  • Faculty Reports: Provides course and summary reports for individual faculty members in your unit.
  • Question Mean Analysis: Provides a summary report for all course sections in your assigned unit.
  • Response Rate Reports: Displays the response rates for courses in your unit.
  • Unit Summary Reports: Displays a summary of all courses in your reporting structure, as described below.

Unit Summary Reports (USRs)

IDEA provides Unit Summary Reports (USRs) for deans, directors, and chairs. The USR is divided into three tabs:

  • Teaching methods priorities tab: This tab provides data and analysis to guide unit leaders on where to focus professional development efforts with links to helpful teaching methods tools.
  • Optimization of relevant learning: Information in this tab is designed to assist unit leaders in determining if the course emphasis and student progress on learning objectives is targeted and specific to learning outcomes for the unit.
  • Learning environment and context: This tab provides specific details related to summative measures, course characteristics, and student characteristics to help leaders better understand the context of courses and students in their unit.

In addition, Institutional norms are also available in the individual course reports. Discipline comparison scores are available for most disciplines, although some disciplines have not met the minimum threshold and new values will be added as new survey data are included.

If you have more than one unit that reports to you, you may need to select a unit to view from the drop-down menu on the top left of the screen. The drop-down menu on the top-right of the screen allows you to select a semester to view.

See “Resources,” Interpretive Guide for Unit Summary Report, for guidance using those reports.

Best Practices for Reviewing Faculty Evaluation Reports

Of course, IDEA evaluations are just one part of faculty teaching portfolios and will be provided with many other documents that speak to faculty teaching, such as peer/chair observations, samples of student work, sample assignments, syllabi and other documentation, grade distributions, and the like.

It is important to remember that student feedback on evaluations should be weighted at no more than 30% to 40% in the overall assessment of teaching effectiveness. IDEA, like all student evaluations, contains noise and error variance. Therefore, we should be careful not to over-interpret small differences (a 3.9 and a 4.1 in any one class is largely indistinguishable). Also, we should take much more stock in trends we see when we look across several classes, as opposed to fixating on one score that may be an exception. In general, we can get reasonably valid interpretations by looking at multiple semesters of data.

FDU’s Faculty Senate Faculty Rights and Welfare Committee (FRW) has issued preliminary guidelines for using IDEA in the faculty review process. See “Resources” on the right for a link to this document, which contains the FRW’s recommended guidelines to assist personnel review committees, Chairs/Directors, and Deans in interpreting IDEA reports. Of course, judgment rests, as always with these bodies — each department or unit may have certain criteria they value more than others. However, the FRW’s guidelines will be helpful to develop cross-university consistency and encourage proper use and interpretation of IDEA evaluation reports.

The IDEA Committee has also developed guidelines for using IDEA evaluation results for evaluative and developmental purposes. See “Resources” for a link to those guidelines.