Faculty Evaluation Practices among Occupational Therapy Chairpersons: A Comparative Study

Abstract

A perennial question for academic health programs has been: What is the relationship between the faculty evaluation practices of academic health programs and those of general liberal arts programs? The purpose of this study was to compare the faculty evaluation practices of a sample of occupational therapy chairpersons with those of a recent national sample of deans of public and private liberal arts colleges Major areas of inquiry focused on institutional policies and practices in evaluating faculty performance in teaching research/scholarship, and institutional/community service The relative importance of various factors as well as their extent of current usage were assessed At a general level of analysis (relative rankings), the faculty evaluation practices of OT chairpersons are significantly related to those reported by public and private liberal arts college deans for the four dimensions of performance The OT chairpersons tend to focus on five major factors to evaluate overall performance, always use one source of information to evaluate teaching performance, always use four types of information to evaluate scholarship/research performance, and consider four major factors in evaluating college service. This pattern involves more factors to evaluate overall performance and college service, with fewer sources of information used to evaluate teaching performance and scholarship/research performance as compared to public and private liberal arts colleges Significant differences were observed between the faculty evaluation considerations of OT chairpersons and public college liberal arts deans in the areas of overall performance (three factors), teaching performance (five factors), and scholarship/research performance(10 factors). While the faculty evaluation practices of OT chairpersons are fairly consistent with the other two groups, questions are raised as to the relative stability and defensibility of the evaluation practices of OT chairpersons for certain dimensions of faculty performance.