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Assessment and Evaluation of Teaching

Instructors:

The CETL encourages faculty to evaluate their teaching effectiveness and can assist by:

• Helping develop discipline-based teaching evaluation instruments.
• Coordinating peer reviews.
• Helping develop self-assessment plans & procedures.
• Providing structured classroom feedback through video taping and in-person observation.
• Helping effectively use student opinion surveys.
• Providing assistance in creating teaching dossiers as a means of reflecting on teaching effectiveness.

Assessment Committee Training:

CETL helps train assessment committee members to evaluate teaching dossiers and discipline-based scholarly activities in teaching for the purpose of tenure, promotion and awards.

Student Opinion Surveys (SOS):

The UNB Student Opinion Survey (SOS) is administered through the registrar's office in and online and/or paper format near the end of each term.

Contact us for help interpreting the survey. Questions about the survey questions should be addressed to CETL and they will be forwarded to the Teaching Enhancement and Policy (TEP) committee.

Assessing Students

Assessment of student performance must be linked to course objectives. Each objective indicates at what level of learning students must be engaged.

For example, the teaching techniques that engage students to the comprehension level (ex. providing examples, nonexamples, problems) do not need to be as elaborate as those required to engage students at the application level (ex. case studies, scenarios, problem-based learning).

Assessment for each objective must also engage students to the level of learning indicated in the objective.

For example, if students learned to apply concepts through case studies, assessment should involve new case studies or items of equal complexity in which students must apply the concept. See Blooms Taxonomy for more information about learning levels.

As well, the volume of assessment items and the overall weighting they have in the course marking scheme should match their relative importance and time spent on them in the course.

Assessment strategy should be set when the course syllabus is created or updated. See the separate section on Course Design.

Designing Student Assessment Tools provides comprehensive guidelines on creating a wide range of test question types problems, and essays.

Here is a good resource on scoring methods and assessment rubrics.

Here are some practical tips for handling anticipated student issues with scoring policies: Grading Practices: Tools for Teaching, University of California at Berkeley.

Assessing Your Teaching Techniques

Classroom Assessment Techniques are tools you can use to have students provide feedback about how well your teaching techniques are working. This kind of information is very helpful to instructors and empowering to students who will become more engaged in the class.

For further information and discussion, contact CETL.