To update its teaching and departmental review processes, Phillips Academy Andover, an independent boarding school in Massachusetts, commissioned RAND Corporation researchers to review the school's policies, conduct a literature review, interview other independent high schools, develop potential recommendations for revision of Andover's processes,…

Faculty members are entrusted with great power to decide who deserves space within the academic profession. Given that the profession's central mission is knowledge production, such decisions inevitably concern epistemic matters, and specifically, what constitutes legitimate knowledge. From this perspective, faculty hiring is not only a matter of…

This article outlines an appreciative inquiry (AI) into a departmental professional development process and describes the resulting implementation of an appreciative peer evaluation meeting as one part of the new professional development process. Using AI, a departmental faculty development committee sought to re-envision the professional…

Higher education in general, and engineering higher education in particular, is constantly under pressure to introduce reforms that improve the employability of graduates. Among the most common claims is the development of a more active and competency-based teaching oriented to the development of professional and personal skills. The university…

In determining whether stumbling blocks exist in the implementation of accounting education reform in Hong Kong, a survey questionnaire was sent to all accounting departments at public universities representing accounting academics, and the Hong Kong Institute of Certified Public Accountants representing the profession. The survey showed that both…

Based on results from a 1999 national survey, William Becker and Michael Watts found that student evaluations of teaching were by far the most widely used, and often the only method used by economics departments, to evaluate teaching in undergraduate economics courses. To investigate whether departments of economics have moved beyond the use of…

Teacher evaluation is currently a major policy issue at all levels of the K-12 system driven in large part by current US Department of Education requirements. The main objective of this study is to explore the patterns of relationship between observational scores and value-added measures of teacher performance in math classrooms and the variation…

This study focuses on aspects of the Changing Academic Profession survey of 2007-08 that describe the place of faculty in their institutions. The authors examine the following aspects of institutional life: (1) the faculty role in institutional governance; (2) who evaluates their teaching and research; (3) the locus of their loyalties as between…

Examines teaching effectiveness as it affects faculty and administrators in departments of speech communication. Summarizes a survey of current evaluation practices in these departments. Discusses what these practices mean for both faculty who are seeking promotion and tenure and administrators who participate in these decisions. (MS)

Department heads from 134 institutions (mainly universities) indicated the weight they generally give to various criteria for evaluating individual faculty members. The questionnaire they responded to included: criteria used for evaluating overall faculty performance; sources of information for evaluating teaching; and kinds of information used…

This book presents 11 contributed papers which examine communication aspects of the department chair position in academia. It is noted that most academic department chairs are not trained in management skills, including communication strategies. After an introductory chapter by Christopher H. Spicer and Ann Q. Staton, the following papers are…

Although the ultimate purpose of faculty evaluation should be improvement of instruction, it appears that most evaluation systems criticize or reject rather than attain better teaching performance. The evaluation instrument in the Department of Media Communication Science at Trenton State College has been lacking in certain evaluative criteria in…

Topics under examination in this article are: what we evaluate and why, humane and scientific evaluation, a plan for classroom visits, and the department as a medley of teaching excellence. (ND)

A summary of the thesis "Evaluation of teaching--an analysis of problems together with some empirical studies at university level" offers a model for evaluation work, and describes three groups of empirical studies: evaluations of courses, surveys of previous knowledge, and factors influencing satisfaction and achievement. (JMD)

This study assessed the ways in which academic departments in U.S. colleges and universities are evaluated through a survey of about 130 institutions across the Carnegie university categories. This survey and literature review were supplemented by site visits to eight universities. The authors were surprised to find a great amount of departmental…