Collaborative Research: Transforming the Evaluation of Teaching: A Study of Institutional Change to Advance STEM Undergraduate Education

美国的经济繁荣依赖于科学的进步、国家卫生计划的推进，以及日益技术化的经济中的整体国家繁荣。这种繁荣依赖于有能力灵活应对新挑战和开发创新技术的人才队伍。学院和大学可以通过采用基于证据的、以学生为中心的教学方法来为未来的劳动力做好最好的准备。该项目将支持和研究采用新的教学评价方法，鼓励使用已知的教学实践来支持满足国家需要所需的卓越学习。长期以来，大学一直依赖学生调查作为评估教学的主要手段，尽管它们有很大的局限性。通过引入教学评估的学术框架，该项目将帮助教师们在各自学科中建立有效教学的共同愿景，确定有效教学的适当证据形式，并将结果框架应用于指导、年度评估、晋升和终身教职等手段。鉴于2014年美国大学招收的1700万本科生中，四年制公立学院和大学占40%（国家教育统计中心），该项目研究教学评估新方法的发展和实施，将为数百所招收数百万学生的类似机构的变革提供模型。在这个项目中，堪萨斯大学、科罗拉多大学博尔德分校和马萨诸塞大学阿默斯特分校将以最适合他们校园文化的方式进行变革。然而，每一个都将实施一个评估框架，该框架是基于20年来学术教学及其评估的学术研究。该框架借鉴了多种证据来源，包括学生、同行、教师，并涉及教与学的多个维度。每个校区的工作将集中在教学评估标准的开发和使用上，以提供更丰富、更完整的教学实践观点，以及证明这一点的证据。每个校区的领导和教职员工也将与其他大学的同事分享他们的经验，创建教职员工学习社区，为改进教学提供进一步的手段。研究人员将研究这三个校区内部和跨校区的转型过程，重点研究在什么情况下哪种方法最有效。在组织变革和组织学习理论的指导下，每个校园的案例研究将阐明导致采用新方法进行教学评估的策略和过程。跨案例分析将更深入地了解这些战略和过程与机构文化和背景相互作用的方式。研究结果还将有助于揭示教学评估制度变革的各个方面，这些方面可能适用于许多制度类型。项目结果将通过知识交流会议、专业和学术会议、高级机构领导人会议、报告和文章传播，以便为全国各地的高等教育机构提供有效的教学评估模式。

The economic prosperity of the United States relies on progress in science, the advancement of national health initiatives, and overall national prosperity in an increasingly technical economy. This prosperity relies on a talented workforce with the ability to nimbly address new challenges and develop innovative technologies. Colleges and universities can best prepare this future workforce by adopting evidence-based, student-centered teaching approaches. This project will support and study the adoption of new approaches to teaching evaluation that encourage the use of teaching practices known to support the excellence in learning needed to address national needs. Universities have long relied on student surveys as the primary means of evaluating instruction, despite their significant limitations. By introducing a scholarly framework for the evaluation of teaching, this project will help faculty members create a shared vision of effective teaching in their discipline, identify appropriate forms of evidence of effective teaching, and apply the resulting framework for such means as mentoring, annual evaluations, promotion and tenure. Given that four-year public colleges and universities accounted for 40% of the 17 million undergraduates enrolled in US universities in 2014 (National Center of Education Statistics), the work in this project to study the development and implementation of new approaches to evaluating teaching will provide models for change at hundreds of similar institutions that enroll millions of students.In this project, the University of Kansas, the University of Colorado at Boulder and the University of Massachusetts Amherst will approach change in ways best suited to their campus culture. Each, though, will implement an evaluation framework that is based on two decades of scholarship on scholarly teaching and its evaluation. The framework draws on multiple sources of evidence, including students, peers, instructors, and that speaks to multiple dimensions of teaching and learning. The work on each campus will center on the development and use of a teaching evaluation rubric that provides a richer, more complete view of teaching practice, and the evidence that speaks to it. Leaders and faculty members at each campus will also share their experiences with colleagues at the other universities, creating faculty learning communities that will provide further means for improving teaching. The researchers will study the process of transformation within and across the three campuses, focusing on what approaches work most effectively under what circumstances. Informed by theories of organizational change and organizational learning, case studies of each campus will illuminate the strategies and processes that lead to adoption of new approaches to teaching evaluation. The cross-case analysis will provide greater insight into the ways in which these strategies and processes interact with institutional cultures and contexts. The research findings will also serve to uncover aspects of institutional change for teaching evaluation that may be adaptable by many institutional types. Project findings will be disseminated through knowledge exchange meetings, professional and scholarly conferences, meetings of senior institutional leaders, reports, and articles in order to provide models of effective teaching evaluation to higher education institutions throughout the country.