Evaluation of Teaching

Evaluation of Teaching for Annual Merit Reviews and Reappointment, Promotion, and Tenure Decisions

The Faculty Representative Assembly Teaching Evaluation Task Force offers numerous recommendations for the evaluation of teaching for annual merit reviews and reappointment, promotion, and tenure. Two key recommendations are:

• Regents policy requires that each unit use at least three measures for teaching evaluations for both annual merit reviews and RPT decisions; FCQs must be used as one of those measures
• Any evaluation based on the FCQ numerical ratings be used for no more than one third of the overall teaching rating of the faculty member
• Read the full report

The College of Letters, Arts & Sciences further has numerous recommendations for the evaluation of teaching in its Advisory Report.

Effective fall 2017, all University of Colorado Faculty Course Questionnaires will be administered online. The following resources examine the issues around response rates for online vs pencil-and-paper FCQs and offer suggestions for encouraging higher response rates.

• Use this Sample Syllabus Entry to explain the importance of the course evaluations
• University of Colorado - Encouraging High Online Response Rates Web Site
• Extra Credit Micro-Incentives and Response Rates for Online Course Evaluations: Two Quasi-Experiments; Eric D. Sundstrom, Erin E. Hardin, and Matthew J. Shaffer; Teaching of Psychology, 2016, Vol. 43(4) 276-284
• The effect of incentives and other instructor-driven strategies to increase online student evaluation response rates; James Goodman, Robert Anson & Marcia Belcheir; Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Volume 40, 2015 - Issue 7, p 958-970
• The adequacy of response rates to online and paper surveys: what can be done?; Duncan D. Nulty; Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, Volume 33, 2008 - Issue 3, p 301-314

I and some of my colleagues in the Departments of Biology and Chemistry & Biochemistry have been using micro-incentives to encourage higher response rates. In my ~150-student Organic Chemistry course, for example, I give every student in class some extra credit points based on the response rate. (We cannot determine who has or has not completed the online FCQs, so the extra credit points have to be applied to all students.) Furthermore, I prorate the extra credit points to the response rate: ≥95% response earns 5 points, ≥90% earns 4 points, and so on. I typically have a response rate of around 90%. Given that I have roughly 1000 points overall in my course, this extra credit amounts to less than 0.5% of the total. Very few students' letter grades are affected by this. I understand that some faculty have concerns about giving extra credit points, but those points certainly help with encouraging higher FCQ response rates.

Last updated July 25, 2022
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