Resources for Evaluating Inclusive Teaching

In the process of exploring sources of evidence for high-quality STEM teaching, LT3 accumulated a number of external resources and tools that one or more participants had made use of in their on-campus work. These useful resources are presented below.

Web Resources

15 ways to get with Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Belonging
This resource for instructors and learning designers was compiled and edited by the Dutton Institute for Teaching and Learning Excellence at Penn State University.

ASCN: Curated Teaching Evaluation Initiative Repository
The Accelerating Systemic Change Network (ASCN) maintains a searchable collection of teaching evaluations, which are assessed on how well they are aligned with systemic change. Teaching initiatives are reviewed regularly by the Repository Editorial Board.

CUE's Racial Equity Tools
The Center for Urban Education at the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education has published a suite of tools for helping educational practitioners build their own knowledge and self-change.  The tools are organized into four flexible phases: Laying the Groundwork; Defining the Problem; Creating Solutions Through Inquiry; Sustaining and Scaling the Work.  The tools are flexible and provide actionable guidance for practitioners regardless of their level of experience with questions of racial equity.

Framework for Equity-focused Teaching
The Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan has published a Framework for Equity-focused Teaching.  The framework includes four Starting Points that give an outline of what Equity-focused Teaching (EfT) is in terms of commitments and goals. Five Practical Elements provide a toolkit for how to put EfT into practice. This guide offers a brief overview of the framework and a list of further resources to support your Equity-focused Teaching practice.

The Research Basis for Equity-focused Teaching
This resource from the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at the University of Michigan provides a helpful literature base addressing the case for inclusive teaching practices.  The research is clear that inclusive teaching practices are helpful for all students' learning but especially beneficial to students who are members of groups underrepresented in their fields or traditionally underserved by institutions of higher education.

TEval: Transforming Higher Education - Multidimensional Evaluation of Teaching
This NSF-sponsored project includes a study of organizational change with regard to institutional evaluation, incentive, and reward processes pertaining to teaching excellence in faculty work. The overall project encourages the use of evaluation, incentive, and reward processes as a lever to promote greater use of evidence-based teaching within universities as complex systems.

Teaching Quality Framework Initiative
The Teaching Quality Framework (TQF) initiative at UC Boulder facilitates departmental and campus-wide efforts to provide a richer evaluation of teaching to enhance the value of high-quality teaching and reward scholarly approaches to improving student learning.

Papers & Articles

American Sociological Association. Statement on Student Evaluations of Teaching, 2019, accessed 202307-11.

Boring, A. Gender Biases in Student Evaluations of Teaching, Journal of Public Economics, 2017, 145, 2741. doi: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2016.11.006

Bradforth, S. E., Miller, E. R., Dichtel, W. R., Leibovich, A. K., Feig, A. L., Martin, J. D., Bjorkman, K. S., Schultz, Z. D., Smith, T. L. University Learning: Improve Undergraduate Science Education, Nature, 2015, 523, 282-284. doi:10.1038/523282a

Brighouse, H. Becoming a Better College Teacher (If You're Lucky), Daedalus, Fall 2019, 148(4). doi: 10.1162/DAED_a_01758

Curtis, J. W. "Persistent Inequity: Gender and Academic Employment," American Association of University Professors, 2011.

Kreitzer, R.J., Sweet-Cushman, J. Evaluating Student Evaluations of Teaching: a Review of Measurement and Equity Bias in SETs and Recommendations for Ethical Reform, Journal of Academic Ethics 2022, 20, 73–84. doi: 10.1007/s10805-021-09400-w

Krishnan, Gehrtz, Lemons, Dolan, Brickman, & Andrews (2022). Guides to Advance Teaching Evaluation (GATEs): A Resource for STEM Departments Planning Robust and Equitable Evaluation Practices. CBE—Life Sciences Education, Vol. 21, No. 3.
This paper describes the process for developing the Guides to Advance Teaching Evaluations (GATEs), which were created to help departments improve their teaching evaluation practices.  There are GATEs for each of the three voices in teaching evaluation: students, peers, and the instructor with three components for each voice: list of departmental target practices to serve as goals, characterization of common starting places, and ideas for getting started.

MacNell, L., Driscoll, A., and Hunt, A. N. What's in a Name: Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching, Innovative Higher Education 2015, 40(4), 291–303. doi: 10.1007/s10755-014-9313-4

Miller, J., and Chamberlin, M. Women Are Teachers, Men are Professors: A Study of Student Perceptions, Teaching Sociology 2000, 28 (4): 283–98. doi : 10.2307/1318580

Reid, L. D. The Role of Perceived Race and Gender in the Evaluation of College Teaching on RateMyProfessors.Com, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2010, 3(3), 137–152. doi: 10.1037/a0019865

Uttl, B., White, C. A., Gonzalez, D. W. Meta-analysis of Faculty's Teaching Effectiveness: Student Evaluation of Teaching Ratings and Student Learning are not Related, Studies in Educational Evaluation, 2017, 54, 22–42. doi: 10.1016/j.stueduc.2016.08.007

Reports & Books

Advancing Inclusion and Anti-Racism in the College Classroom: A rubric and resource guide for instructors 
This resource from the University of California, Berkeley, Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management aims to support instructors in developing anti-racist approaches to course design and teaching practices in the undergraduate and graduate setting. It offers an accessible, and user-friendly entry-point for instructors interested in considering how their instructional choices impact student outcomes.

Aligning Practices to Policies: Changing the Culture to Recognize and Reward Teaching at Research Universities
Association of American Universities and Research Corporation for Science Advancement, 2017.

Searching for Better Approaches: Effective Evaluation of Teaching and Learning in STEM
This publication is the result of a workshop held in January 2014 by the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative and the Association of American Universities to discuss how to more effectively evaluate teaching and learning in undergraduate STEM education.The AAU launched a major initiative to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching and learning in STEM fields in 2011 and created the Cottrell Scholars Collaborative. AAU staff and a group of Cottrell Scholars held a joint workshop on the effective evaluation of undergraduate teaching and learning to address a major barrier to improving the quality of undergraduate education: the predominant use of student-based evaluations to assess teaching quality.