Review Committees

Evaluation Data Faculty Submit for Review

In addition to reviewing data on the Unit Summary Reports, review committees, deans, directors, and chairs will also receive IDEA data for review as part of faculty teaching portfolios.

The “Reviewing, Reporting, and Using Evaluation Results” page for faculty outlines the IDEA data that faculty are asked to provide in their teaching portfolios. That data includes IDEA evaluation reports for each course, Rapport and Pedagogy Scores Using the Endeavor formula (for tenure-track faculty hired prior to Fall 2014), and a Faculty Self-Reflection form for each course.

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.