TEACHING STANDARDS WITH IDEA

If Kutztown University adopts the Diagnostic IDEA Instrument, a Course Summary Report of each course section will be generated. The first page of the report contains a Summary Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness, and the remainder contains data collected from the diagnostic questions. The IDEA Center recommends that the diagnostic data not be used for administrative decisions. Click HERE for a sample Course Summary Report from The IDEA Center.

The Kutztown University IDEA Task Force recommends that:

• For official purposes of faculty evaluation (i.e. yearly and five-year review, tenure, and promotion) all that is required to be submitted from the IDEA Report is the Summary Evaluation of Teaching Effectiveness (the first page) and qualitative responses to any open-ended questions.
• A faculty member may include in his or her evaluation material any additional information from the report that her or she sees fit.
• The faculty member being evaluated, his or her chair, and his or her peer evaluation committee will receive the full IDEA report in a manner that is consistent with Section VI of the Administrative Procedures section of this document.
• The results from the student ratings should constitute only 30 to 50 percent of the overall evaluation of teaching, with a percentage closer to 30 percent being preferred.
• Adjusted converted averages* compared to the entire IDEA database be used in evaluating faculty teaching in most circumstances.
• Raw converted averages* be used (instead of adjusted converted averages) in cases where the raw average score* is high.
• Data generated from classes with ten or fewer respondents is to be considered unreliable because the number of students responding is so small.
• Data generated from classes with fourteen or fewer respondents is to be considered only marginally reliable because the number of students responding is so small.
• Data generated from classes where the percentage of the students responding is less than fifty percent is to be considered inadequate to assure representativeness.

*The IDEA Center describes the scores that they report as follows:

Raw averages: are the average of student responses for that question. In the case of Progress on Relevant Objectives the raw average is a weighted average of learning objectives identified on the Faculty Information Form as important or essential. The objectives identified as essential are double weighted, and those that are identified as important are singly weighted.

These raw averages are modified in two ways:

Adjusted averages: are corrected for factors which affect student ratings yet are beyond the instructor’s control (such as student motivation, student work habits, class size, and course difficulty).

Converted averages: take into account the fact that the average ratings for items on the IDEA form are not equal as students report more progress on some objectives than on others. Converted averages are reported as weighted T-scores which compare student ratings for a course with those in the entire IDEA database, the IDEA discipline, or the institution (KU) as a whole (after 400 courses have been evaluated).

Summary evaluation: are converted averages that are calculated from both raw and adjusted averages.

The IDEA Center states that “it is best to regard the ‘true score’ for a converted average as lying within + or – 3 of the reported score.” In other words, converted averages differing quantitatively by less than six are not significantly different.

Please see the complete report for more details about Teaching Standards.