How to Use IDEA to Improve Your Teaching

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Early in the semester you will receive a report from the IDEA center that summarizes your student feedback. This web page outlines ways of using this report for promotion and tenure purposes, and of using the report to improve your teaching.

Return all completed IDEA packets to the IT Test Scoring department by December 23rd, 4 pm for final processing!

The IDEA Report: Promotion & Tenure Uses

The IDEA center recommends that you turn in only the first two pages of your report to your department chair for promotion and tenure purposes. The first page summarizes student responses to the survey items: "Excellent Teacher," "Excellent Course," "Progress on Relevant Objectives." The second pages summarizes student responses to the objectives that you marked as Essential or Important in your blue Faculty Information Form.

Your department may already have procedures in place for collecting the first two pages of your report. If this is not the case, consider meeting with your department chair and other faculty in your department to formalize a procedure for collecting these pages.

If you are a department chair, consider reading the IDEA Center article: "Using IDEA Results for Administrative Decision-Making."

The IDEA Report: Improving Your Teaching

Those instructors who elected to have their students fill out the Long Form will also receive a report on how to improve their teaching (see image below)--relative to the learning objectives indicated on the IDEA Faculty Information Form. The report suggests up to twenty teaching methods that instructors can use to improve student learning.

Step 1. Read Page 3 of your Long Form Report

For each suggested teaching method that is marked as either "Consider Increasing Use" or "Retain Current Use or Consider Increasing" there is a corresponding short report on the IDEA Center website, written by an educational researcher, that describes best practices for that method.

Step 2. Read the Best Practice Reports at the IDEA Center Website