Survey of College Efforts to Improve Teaching Effectiveness

The study presents data and commentary from 24 academic institutions from their centers of teaching effectiveness or other institutional centers to enhance the quality of instruction. The 150+ page report gives highly detailed data about budgets, personnel, technology, and strategy in improving overall educational effectiveness, especially the quality of instruction. Among the many additional issues covered: levels of cooperation from various college departments with centers of teaching effectiveness, the popularity of instructing college teachers in many aspects of teaching including: use of distance learning and blended learning, use of new and emerging technologies, use of classroom response systems and course management systems, dealing with disabilities in the classroom, grading strategies, and much much more. The study also looks at time and workload management for offices of teaching effectiveness, defining how much staff time they spend with adjuncts, postdocs, tenured and untenured faculty, and exploring which subject areas do offices of teaching effectiveness focus on. Additional areas covered include: grants and funding for teaching effectiveness efforts, the use of awards for excellence in teaching, the role of student evaluations, legal issues in teacher evaluation and new ideas for instructor assessment and development. Just a few of the report’s many findings are that: • The offices of teaching effectiveness in the sample had a budget ranging from $85,000 to $1,500,000. • 25% of the institutions sampled gave monetary awards for excellence in teaching. • For research universities, a mean of close to 24% of the staff time of offices of teaching effectiveness was spent helping teaching assistants. • Community college offices of teaching effectiveness spent a mean of 30% of their staff time working with adjuncts. • The mean number of employees of the office of teaching effectiveness for all the organizations in the sample was 3.32.