Fall 2018: Faculty Development Events

 The Our Shared Humanities grant committee (generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation) is very excited to invite faculty to a free lunch plenary and afternoon workshop designed and delivered by educators from the Alan Alda Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University. It will introduce faculty members to communication techniques for conveying information about their research and its value in ways that make it understandable and personal to their audiences. Among the skills to be discussed are how to distill a message, effective media interview skills, and reading your audience. Although the plenary and workshop is geared towards helping scientists effectively distill and communicate complex ideas, faculty members from all disciplines are invited and can benefit from this professional development opportunity. Sign up today!

OCT. 25, 2018: DR. BOB UTTL | Website
Professor of Psychology, Mount Royal University
PSYCHOLOGY SPEAKER SERIES/OUR SHARED HUMANITIES
12:50 PM–1:50 PM
Location Karp 105 | Lunch & Refreshments Provided!

Topic: Student evaluations of teaching ratings do not measure teaching effectiveness and are not suitable for evaluation of faculty

Description: Student evaluation of teaching (SET) ratings are used to evaluate faculty’s teaching effectiveness based on a widespread belief that students learn more from more highly rated professors. However, using SET in high stakes personnel decisions such as hiring, firing, promotion, tenure, and merit pay decisions is fatally flawed. First, SET do not measure faculty’s teaching effectiveness; students do not learn more from more highly rated professors. Second, SET measure students’ perceptions or students’ satisfaction with something but this satisfaction depends on many teaching effectiveness irrelevant factors (TEIFs). Third, SET are influenced by attributes of professors that universities would be ill advised to consider in high stakes personnel decisions. In summary, SET measure student satisfaction rather than faculty’s teaching effectiveness, are influenced by TEIFs, are subject to a number of biases, and are ultimately unsuitable for evaluation of faculty.

About:

Bob Uttl is a professor of Psychology at Mount Royal University (MRU), a midsize undergraduate university in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is a cognitive psychologist with main research interests in memory, intelligence, aging, assessment and psychometrics. Over the years, he has published over 50 research papers and given hundreds of conference presentations. In any given year, he typically teaches statistics, advanced research methods, psychometrics, and cognitive psychology courses. He has taught and/or conducted research in a number of academic institutions including National Institutes of Health, USA; Oregon State University, USA; Tsukuba University, Japan; Tamagawa University, Japan; Red Deer College, Canada; and Mount Royal University, Canada. He has accumulated lots of experience with SET both as a faculty member whose “teaching effectiveness” was evaluated primarily if not exclusively by SET scores; as a member and later a chair of promotion and tenure committees; and as a co-chair and later chair of Mount Royal Association’s Faculty Evaluation Committee; and as a co-author of a several high impact papers examining validity and biases of SET ratings. One of his recent papers “Meta-analysis of faculty’s teaching effectiveness: Student evaluation of teaching ratings and student learning are not related”, co-authored with two of his undergraduate students, Carmela White and Daniela Wong Gonzalez, has been cited over 80 times within 2 years. Perhaps even more importantly, this paper has amassed Altmetric attention score of 2,501 reflecting a rank of #298 out of nearly 12 million articles tracked by Altmetric and high impact of the article outside of traditional academic research. Professor Uttl’s SET related research has been featured in a number of news outlets including Inside Higher Ed, University Herald, The Guardian and elsewhere.

When:

Tuesday, November 13th

• 12:50-1:45 pm: See it Work!
• 2:00-4:00 pm: Find out How It Works!

Where:

•  Learning Lab: Schaffer Library 232
• No need to RSVP…just come on by!

Join ITS’ Learning Technologies team for lunch and see a showcase of learning technologies and potential models for how and why you might integrate them with your students. After the lunch, stay for a closer look into Union’s supported learning technologies and receive hands-on training on those technologies that pique your interest. (If you aren’t able to stay for the hands-on training, feel free to schedule a one-on-one appointment with a member of the LTE staff at your convenience.)