Implementing a Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness

With support from NSF's Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Education and Human Resources (IUSE: EHR) program, this project aims to serve the national interest by encouraging and measuring the use of effective teaching practices in college STEM courses. Widespread improvement in the learning and academic success of students requires widespread commitment to good teaching by faculty and by educational institutions. Good teaching includes the use of student-centered, evidence-based, active-learning instructional practices. Although it is well-established that instruction using these practices enhances student success, faculty and institutions have been slow and inconsistent in adopting them. Shared measurements and evaluation approaches can enhance commitments to good teaching, but more work is needed to sustain improvements and to make good teaching the norm. To address this issue, the investigators have developed a framework and accompanying rubric to assess teaching effectiveness that emphasizes student-centered, evidence-based, active-learning practices. This project will investigate the potential of the framework and rubric in faculty evaluation processes. To do so, it will set up a mock STEM 'department' of 30 diverse faculty members, along with a mock department chair and a mock promotion and tenure committee. The mock department will use the framework and rubric in the course of faculty evaluation. Using institutional data as the control, the project team will investigate how using the framework affects faculty members' teaching practices and attitudes about the campus climate around teaching. This small-scale study is one step toward achieving the vision of an educational system in which learner-centered teaching is appropriately assessed, recognized, and rewarded.

The goal of the project is to introduce a new strategy for assessing teaching and to explore challenges to its adoption, with the intent of informing policy, practice, and further development of the framework. The investigators' Framework for Assessing Teaching Effectiveness focuses on four elements of effective teaching, all of which need to be present to optimize student learning: effective course design, scholarly teaching, learner-centeredness, and professional development. Workshops will be offered through the Center for Teaching and Learning to support departmental implementation of the framework in faculty evaluation processes, support faculty members in compiling a teaching portfolio in response to the framework, and support instructors in adopting the kinds of teaching practices described in the framework. The investigators will examine whether changes to the framing and assessment of teaching will result in (1) changes in faculty members' perceptions of the campus culture and the value placed on teaching, (2) changes to teaching practices, and (3) increased motivation to adopt the effective teaching practices described in the framework. The investigators will measure potential changes in practices and climate using data from different sources, including faculty portfolio narratives and rubric scores, focus groups, and student outcomes, as well as tools such as the Evidence Based Instructional Practices Adoption Scale, the Classroom Observations Protocol for Undergraduate STEM, the Current Instructional Climate Survey, the Postsecondary Instructional Practices Survey, and the Student Evaluation of Teaching. NSF's IUSE: EHR program supports research and development projects to improve the effectiveness of STEM education for all students. This is a project in the Engaged Student Learning track, which supports the creation, exploration, and implementation of promising practices and tools.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.