Evaluation of university teaching as sound performance appraisal

Abstract

As research on student evaluations of teaching (SET) has dominated our understanding of teaching evaluation, debate over SET implementation has turned attention away from basic principles for appraising employee performance as established in human resources literature. Considering SET research and its practical significance in isolation from relevant human resources literature not only risks unlawful remedies for issues such as bias in SET but also risks replacing one form of bias with another. Meanwhile, the full potential of human resources tools to support consistent evaluation of teaching remains unrealized. To address this gap, this article clarifies how teaching evaluation can be conducted as sound performance appraisal by deploying SET and peer review of teaching within a larger framework of established human resources techniques. A review of recent literature articulates prominent themes in research on SET and peer review of teaching and outlines key principles for performance appraisal and performance management. Those principles are used to analyze representative faculty evaluation policies and procedures and clarify the weaknesses of both traditional and recently revised approaches to teaching evaluation. The final section elaborates performance appraisal techniques relevant to teaching evaluation. These include planful use of results and/or behavior approaches to performance appraisal, robust rating instruments for behavioral performance appraisal, targeted collection of information from multiple stakeholders, and job analysis. Efforts to de-emphasize quantitative SET data to address issues such as bias can be strengthened through the incorporation of performance appraisal tools that clearly articulate performance criteria and standards and that gather both qualitative and quantitative data on employee performance.