Method for Evaluating Faculty Development

This month the Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) published a white paper, entitled “Connecting the Dots: A Proposed Accountability Method for Evaluating the Efficacy of Faculty Development and Its Impact on Student Outcomes (2018)" that presents a research-based approach to evaluating the impact of faculty development on faculty, students, and institutions. Developed over the past year with university partners and their teaching centers. You can review a summary of the paper on the community site or read the full paper.

In summary, this paper describes a six-level evaluation approach, grounded in the model of Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick (2007) and informed by Guskey’s (2000) and Hines’s (2011) application to educational settings. The six levels are (a) faculty engagement, (b) faculty learning, (c) faculty implementation, (d) student engagement, (e) course-level student outcomes, and (f) institutional outcomes. A major finding is in the area of reflection. The research on self-refection, is integral to the faculty course experience because “doing and thinking are complementary” (Schön, 1983) and critical refection “develop[s] a rationale for practice” (Brook eld, 2017). Further, Pallas, Neumann, and Campbell (2017) have noted, “Although more needs to be understood about college instructors’ learning, research suggests that one process, in particular, is key: that is, refection, needed as instructors probing their own thoughts about teaching—before, during, or after engaging in it.”