Linear regression models that predict faculty salaries from professional and affirmative action variables were developed to validate promotion and merit criteria, set a starting salary scale, and identify possible systematic and individual salary inequities. All 377 full-time teaching faculty and librarians (309 men and 68 women) employed by a…

The negative effects of academic burnout on teaching, service, and research are considered, along with societal, institutional, and individual causes of burnout. Prevention and intervention for burnout are addressed, and suggestions are offered to improve faculty evaluation procedures in order to promote the use of clearer and more systematic and…

Four strategies that deans and vice-presidents can use to enhance teaching are suggested. The first strategy is to seek out and fund teaching support activities that are the state of the art in each discipline. The second is to reward professors for excellence in teaching more than for excellence in research. Third, administrators should develop…

A model for assuring quality in the development of course objectives and classroom and exit examinations is presented. The model was based on a pilot study with 131 faculty at the University of Central Florida. It was found that 91% of teaching faculty create 100% of the tests they use to evaluate student performance. The faculty seemed to use…

The importance of diagnostic testing for appropriate student placement at open door colleges is discussed, along with approaches to upgrade teacher skills. It is suggested that colleges typically select students who are skilled and motivated enough to acquire knowledge by the approaches currently offered, and that colleges thus act as screeners…

Issues pertaining to the validity of student ratings of teacher effectiveness, research on "educational seduction," and implications of the research for the evaluation and improvement of teaching are reviewed. Criteria that have been used to validate student ratings include student achievement, faculty ratings, self-ratings, research productivity,…

The issue of qualifications for tenure is examined with attention to judicial tests for qualification in lawsuits in which faculty alleged that negative tenure decisions were infected with illegal discrimination. The focus is the degree to which a faculty plaintiff must demonstrate at the first stage of the lawsuit that he or she was qualified for…

Post-tenure faculty evaluation policies in all public four-year colleges and universities in Alabama were studied. A total of 420 tenured and nontenured full-time faculty and tenured and nontenured administrators were administered questionnaires. A total of 68.8 percent of administrator respondents revealed that they had written policies to…

The way that department heads interpret the effort required by college faculty to teach classes was studied with a national sample of 491 department heads in 25 major U.S. universities. Based on the responses of department heads, a model was developed to relate the effort required to teach a class to the level, size, instructional mode, and…

Research that led to the development of an instrument and a program for collecting students' evaluations of college/university teaching is summarized. The current version of Students' Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ), which is appended, was developed at the University of Southern California (USC). (The first SEEQ was developed at the…

Faculty in a medium-sized (20 to 30 member) college department were rated as teachers by their students, departmental colleagues, and departmental chairperson. Departmental faculty were also rated as researchers by their departmental colleagues. Several ratings and ranking techniques were employed over a three-year period. Colleague ratings of…

Continuing educators can gain knowledge about their programs' environments, as well as predict the outcomes of change processes, by utilizing an emerging systems concept called the communication model. Utilization of the communication model involves three steps: (1) diagramming the perceived reality of the organizational system, (2) using the…

A growing movement to improve the quality of teaching has been called "faculty development." It is based on three assumptions: the primary professional activity of most faculty is teaching; instructional behaviors are learned skills, attitudes, and goals; and faculty can be taught how to improve their classroom performance. Interest in faculty…

Learning communities are becoming important components of faculty teaching responsibilities. This study addresses faculty's perceptions of its role as learning community participants. A survey administered in December 1998 to faculty (n=67) at the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Central Florida focused on how they viewed…

This paper advances 22 ideas for reducing the conflict between teaching and research demands of faculty at public research universities, based on suggestions generated by an ad hoc group of professors at the University of Iowa. Departments should try to make teaching as documentable as research, make teaching accomplishments as…