UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs will begin implementing a new Faculty Teaching Assessment Framework that incorporates multiple data points, including student feedback, self-reflection from faculty members, and feedback from peers. The new framework was recommended by the Penn State Faculty Senate and approved by President Neeli Bendapudi in May.
This change comes after two years of work between faculty senators and members of the administration. The Faculty Teaching Assessment Framework report was passed by the Faculty Senate in September 2021 to replace the existing Student Ratings of Teacher Effectiveness (SRTEs) by creating a more holistic framework for assessing faculty effectiveness. The framework identifies four Elements of Teaching Effectiveness — effective design, effective instruction, inclusive and ethical pedagogy, and reflective and revolving practice — to serve as standards against which the combined sources of evidence are assessed.
That advisory and consultative report — the result of a collaboration between three senate standing committees: Faculty Affairs, Intra-university Relations, and Educational Equity and Campus Environment — was approved by the president for consideration of implementation at the Nov. 16, 2021, senate meeting.
A joint implementation task force was formed in spring 2022 and charged with facilitating the implementation of the Faculty Teaching Assessment Framework, which was completed with the presentation of reports on all three pillars at Faculty Senate’s April plenary meeting.
“I want to thank the Faculty Senate for all of its hard work over the past two years, working out the details of implementing this new framework for assessing faculty teaching effectiveness,” said Kathy Bieschke, vice provost for faculty affairs. “Their hard work and attention to detail has been greatly appreciated throughout this process, and their impact on the teaching assessment process will be felt for years to come.”
Student feedback
Elements of the new framework will be implemented gradually, beginning with the student feedback surveys. Students will be prompted to provide feedback twice throughout the course, through the Midsemester Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (MSEEQ) and the end-of-semester Student Educational Experience Questionnaire (SEEQ). The revised end-of-course student feedback surveys will begin to be administered in fall 2023 and mid-semester feedback beginning in spring 2024.
Questions, which will be a mix of open-ended and Likert-scale style, will ask for student feedback on learning objectives and training methods, rather than their perception of the individual faculty member, with the goal of reducing bias in the responses.
“In the current system, the main evaluative factor in the review of faculty for promotion and tenure is quantitative SRTEs, which have been documented to contribute to systemic bias, supplemented by verbatim student comments that are selected for inclusion based on inconsistent or idiosyncratic guidelines,” said Denise Solomon, distinguished professor of communication arts and sciences and co-chair of the subcommittee on implementing the student feedback portion of the faculty teaching assessment framework. “The new process for incorporating student feedback in promotion and tenure decisions retains student feedback as a vital part of faculty evaluations, while attenuating the potential for taking student ratings or comments out of context in ways that can contribute to bias in the review of faculty.”
The mid-semester feedback (MSEEQ), which will be distributed during weeks four through five of 15-week courses, will be only available to the instructor. This feedback will allow instructors to implement changes before the end of the semester and students to benefit from those changes.
A forthcoming change to the review process, which will take place no earlier than fall 2025, is that each candidate for promotion/tenure will be evaluated by a Student Feedback Report Committee, comprised of three faculty members, the unit administrator and the candidate themselves. Members of these committees, as well as those conducting annual teaching reviews, are encouraged to participate in professional development on interpreting student feedback from the Schreyer Institute of Teaching Excellence. The Office of the Vice Provost for Faculty Affairs will work with the Standing Advisory Committee for the Assessment of Teaching Effectiveness to develop resources to support this change.
Peer review
Peer reviews — both formative and summative — will complement student feedback by enabling peers to evaluate a full range of teaching activities. Under the framework, two types of reviews can take place: formative, focused on teaching improvement as part of ongoing professional development, or summative, focused on informing personnel decisions, including reappointment, promotion and/or tenure decisions.
Formative reviews are intended for faculty consumption, not for use by the administrator in the summative evaluation, but aspects of the formative evaluation may be integrated into a dossier at the faculty member’s discretion. Reviews also may include classroom observation for in-person courses or a review of course materials for online or hybrid courses.
Individual units will have flexibility in determining the best practices for peer reviews and in how they will be implemented in accordance with the unit’s own unique standards and practices. Academic units have been asked to review and submit updated peer review guidelines to the vice provost for faculty affairs by July 1, 2024.
The Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence has launched a new Assessment of Teaching series of webpages with resources about how to prepare for an upcoming peer review, as well as resources for peer reviewers. Units also may request a custom workshop on peer review from the Schreyer Institute.
“We spent the summer building resources and webpages to support faculty in all three components of the new framework, including resources to help faculty reflect on their teaching for their annual reviews, and for academic unit heads to revise peer-review guidelines,” said Angela Linse, executive director of the Schreyer Institute for Teaching Excellence and associate dean for teaching. “We’ll also continue to help faculty interpret student feedback results.”
Self-reflection
Self-reflection provides faculty with an opportunity to assess and reflect on their teaching practices and administrators another datapoint in evaluation. As is the case with peer reviews, units will have flexibility in determining the best practices for self-evaluation.
Every year, faculty will go through the process of writing a self-reflection, which will include collecting analysis of evidence, a reflection of the findings, and a plan for future instruction. That evidence may include a faculty member’s observations about student engagement, student performance on assignments, or discussion of new instructional approaches. It also may include comments about other assessments of teaching, such as student feedback and peer reviews.
Faculty self-reflections should address the Elements of Effective Teaching, which can be found on the Schreyer Institute’s Assessment of Teaching webpage. Questions about any aspect of the assessment can be emailed to site@psu.edu.
Built into the framework is a process for periodically reviewing and revising the system for evaluating teaching effectiveness. The review process, led by a standing advisory committee, will assess consistent implementation, equitable practices and antibias measures.
Members of the 2023-34 Standing Advisory Committee for the Assessment of Teaching Effectiveness will include a mix of administrators and faculty senators: Bieschke; Victor Brunsden, associate professor of mathematics at Penn State Altoona; Denise Costanzo, associate professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture; Abby Diehl, assistant vice provost for faculty affairs; Paul Frisch, assistant teaching professor of history at Penn State Scranton; Linse; Jennelle Malcos, teaching professor of biology in the Eberly College of Science; Carey McDougall, interim chancellor at Penn State Beaver; Yvette Richardson, professor of meteorology and senior associate dean for undergraduate education for the College of Earth and Mineral Sciences; and Solomon. Additional members are expected to be added as the committee defines its tasks.