Brief Summary

History

Beginning in the fall of 2003, a committee representing faculty from the teaching, research and extension divisions of the College developed College principles for recognizing and rewarding excellence that would serve to strengthen the evaluation of teaching, research and extension faculty. These principles became the foundation of the values inherent in the College’s faculty evaluation process. Concurrent with the effort to develop these principles, the College also developed and implemented an electronic faculty report and evaluation tool known as eFARS. All faculty in the college complete their annual report using this on-line system and receive feedback on their performance from their unit leader.

Principles

The foundation expectations for the faculty evaluation process are:

• The evaluation process should evaluate the effectiveness of teaching, extension and research, using a combination of measures that provides a fair and thorough evaluation.
• Expectations of faculty shall be clearly communicated.
• Performance outcomes should have a relationship to rewards.
• More experienced faculty should be utilized as mentors to assist in the development of others.
• Evaluations should focus on measurable outcomes and programmatic impacts for relevant client groups such as students, sponsors and the general public.
• Qualitative assessment of teaching, research and extension activities should be multi-dimensional and much broader than an assessment of numbers of deliverables.
• There should be a link between the outcomes created by faculty performance and overall college and university strategies.

Criteria

A core principle of the evaluation process is that it should be driven by criteria and documentation of program quality. A key component is that all faculty are expected to engage in scholarly activities, defined as “creative work that is peer reviewed and publicly disseminated,” and the college adopted a series of factors that can be evaluated in assessing the scholarship of faculty activities. These criteria include:

• Evaluation of research scholarship is based on factors such as the quality of journals in which research publications appear, the contribution of research content to the body of knowledge, graduate student training and the ability to garner program support.
• Evaluation of teaching scholarship is based on factors such as classroom management, student evaluations knowledge of the discipline and learning outcomes for students.
• Evaluation of extension scholarship includes factors such as program impact on participants, quality of publications and teaching, involvement with the community and external stakeholders and utilization of volunteers.