As a continuation of the last blog on the first two reasons for not using global items for summative decisions about faculty, this blog describes the third and most important reason:
3. PROFESSIONAL AND LEGAL STANDARDS: One or 2 global rating item scores alone for major summative decisions about faculty performance are totally inadequate. That administrative practice violates national testing/scaling practices according to the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing and EEOC Uniform Guidelines on Employee Selection Procedures, plus the rulings from a large corpus of court cases on this topic. Essentially, it's ILLEGAL to make such personnel decisions about faculty. Clearly, these are PERSONNEL decisions about us, not instructional or curriculum decisions. In the case of employee decisions like these, 1 or 2 items do not reflect an accurate assessment of the instructor's job behaviors. A total scale score based on, for example, 35 items defining effective teaching behaviors, or subscale scores on specific areas of teaching competency would satisfy those criteria. A long history of court cases on personnel decisions indicates that the instrument used for personnel decisions must be based on a comprehensive job analysis of the job’s tasks related to a person’s knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs). The behaviors listed as items on the total scale satisfy that standard for teaching effectiveness.
Although administrators have used global items in some form for decisions about faculty teaching performance for quite some time, those practices should stop. They have lawsuit written all over them. As noted above, important, possibly career-changing, individual personnel decisions are held to the highest standards professionally and legally, as they should be. If the instructor being violated is a minority or female, be prepared for an EEOC offensive. If you know an administrator who is engaging in such practices, the recommendation is “cease and desist.”
What’s the alternative? Use the total scale score or subscale scores for different areas of performance in conjunction with other measures, such as peer evaluations, self-ratings, and a dozen other possible sources of evidence (for further details, see my October 25, 2009 blog and Thirteen Strategies… Stylus Publisher link in right margin).
Please let me know your thoughts and observations on my recommendations in these blogs.
COPYRIGHT © 2009 Ronald A. Berk, LLC
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