College publishes on teaching incentives

Faculty and staff in the East Tennessee State University College of Public have published an article in Pedagogy in Health Promotion.  The article, The Effectiveness of a Merit- and Productivity-Based Teaching Incentive in a College of Public Health, discusses the first four years of a program that provides a financial incentive program for faculty who exhibit excellence in teaching.  

Dara Young, academic coordinator for the Department of Health Sciences, is lead author of the article.  Randy Wykoff, dean, and Janet Stork, event and project coordinator for the College of Public Health, and Megan Quinn, associate professor in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology, are co-authors.  

In 2016, the College of Public Health implemented an incentive program for faculty who were receiving external support for research.  In 2017, a second incentive program, targeted to excellent in teaching, was implemented.  Based on the recommendation of the faculty-led ad hoc Educational Excellent Committee, the decision was made to base the “teaching incentive” on two major criteria:  A composite score on the teaching effectiveness questions on the student assessment of instruction (SAI) that was in the top third for the college, and at least a 40% response rate on the SAI.   

Over the first four years of the teaching incentive, statistically significant increases were seen in both the composite score on the teaching effectiveness questions and on the percent response rate of the SAI.  The mean score of teaching effectiveness increased more for the college (3.47 to 3.59, a 3.5% increase) than for the university (3.42 to 3.45, a 0.6% increase).    The percent of courses with greater than a 40% response rate increased from 39.6% to 51.9%.

A teaching incentive has been shown to increase both the student response rate on the student assessment of instruction and on the students’ assessment of teaching effectiveness. This teaching incentive could, at its most basic, be seen as a merit-based mechanism to reward those faculty who are the most effective in the classroom based on currently available evaluation metrics.