Accountability Report

Appendices

Appendix E
Summaries of Student and Faculty Comments

Summary of Student Responses
Summary of Faculty Responses

Teaching/Education
Service
Research, Scholarship and Creative Contributions

Part I: Summary of Student Responses

1. On what basis do you judge whether a class is worthwhile or not? How do you judge the quality of a class?
   1. Quality of the instructor
   2. Amount of knowledge acquired
   3. Relatedness of the material to the "real world"
      If there is interesting material/subject matter
   4. If there was a "need" to attend lecture
   5. If class fulfills its description in catalog/purpose
   6. If other students recommended the course
      If the course is challenging
   7. If the class is inspiring
      If the text is relevant/helpful to the course
      If the class size is not too big
      If the grading is fair
      If it is a required course

2. What qualities do you expect in teaching from a university professor?
   1. Ability to lecture/communicate the subject matter
   2. Knowledge of the subject matter
   3. Enthusiastic/inspiring attitude
   4. Availability to students
   5. High level of care about students' progress
   6. Challenging material
   7. Organized
   8. Ability to set guidelines/clear syllabus
      Interacts with class
      Open minded to alternative opinions
      
   9. Patience
      Confidence
      Fair grading system

3. Please list the top five things that the University of Washington should be accountable for;
   (for example: advising, course access, access to majors, personal safety, child care, quality of life on campus, transportation)
   1. Improving course access
   2. Quality advising/career counseling
   3. Personal safety
   4. Quality of Instruction
   5. Quality of Life (Room and Board)
   6. Tuition rates
   7. Response to/Consideration of student opinion
   8. Technology
      Transportation
      Faculty evaluations
      Providing students with activities
      Quality of the libraries
      Health Care
      Child Care
      Diverse types of majors

4. You came to the University of Washington with certain expectations. Please name one pleasant surprise you have discovered and one disappointment that you've encountered here at the UW.

   Pleasant surprise:

   1. There are lots of things to do
   2. Professors/T.A.s are available to help students
      There are lots of academic opportunities
      UW is large, but you can find your "niche"/make a difference
   3. Research facilities are cutting edge
      Professors are some of the best
      Not all of the classes are huge
      Students are friendly
      Campus is attractive
   4. Great library system
      Some easy classes available
      Honors classes are good
      T.A. quality is very good
      ROTC program

   Disappointment:

   1. Too many huge, overcrowded, impersonal classes
   2. Classes are hard to get into
      Some departments are set up poorly, have little funding
      Advising and career counseling is very lacking
      Tenured professors don't care about students, are poor teachers
   3. Teachers that are research oriented and lack lecture ability
   4. Math 111/112 teachers are "horrible" and "should be thrown out"
      Poor teaching ability in the Physics department
      Students don't want to get involved
      Lack of school spirit
      Teachers refer you to T.A.s
      Professors are stuck to the course subject matter/don't encourage thinking outside of material covered on test
      There are too many left-wing political groups on campus
      Students are more interested in material satisfaction than on learning

5. Your pay a large amount of money to enroll here at the University. Do you feel that you have received or are receiving your money's worth? Why or why not?

   Yes	11
   No	9
   Yes and No	5

   Comments on question 5:

   • I am completely against a 10% raise (of tuition) every year.
   • UW students who pay out-of-state tuition pay less than the same group of students at peer universities.
   • The cost of UW tuition seems to be justified in that it is a research school and UW has overall national prestige.
   • UW is a well-recognized 4-year university with great opportunities.
   • I understand the need for diversity, but I am hesitant to spend so much of my money on small groups.
   • My tuition money is paying for a huge infrastructure of bureaucracy and bureaucrats rather than the teaching faculty.
   • You can't monetize the worth of education.
   • The state should match at least twice what students pay in tuition, because we will eventually benefit the state greatly.
   • I am forced to take diversity distribution requirements and I will never use the knowledge I learned from them, so the classes are pointless.
   • Relative to other schools, this is one of the best deals nationwide--it better stay that way.

Part II: Summary of Faculty Responses

Teaching/Education

1. What is it that you do that is most effective in educating students?
   • Perhaps the most effective thing I do in educating students is to open up for them worlds...that they didn't know existed. And that opening up can occur in many forms: lectures, reading, and discussions after class or in the office.
   • I think some of the most effective teaching comes from one-on-one interaction with students.
   • Being a good role model and working one on one.
   • To develop an effective college-level class one needs to spend time to learn the latest information and put it into a form that is easily accessible to students, either at the undergraduate or graduate level.
   • Remain up to date in my field by being an active researcher.

2. How do you know when student learning has occurred?
   • When students both ask questions and think about how they could be answered, they have learned how to continue learning indefinitely and increased their independence in learning.
   • I prepare learning objectives that describe the activities students are expected to be capable of when the class is complete. I use exams to measure student ability to perform these activities.
   • Learning is cumulative, ongoing, and lifelong. A college education provides an excellent foundation upon which to build. No one has yet found any effective way to measure these long term effects...
   • I think that the most important gauge of learning biology isn't what they can answer, but what they can now ASK.
   • In lecture classes, the examinations provide the best indication of student learning: students can solve problems or even approach problems that were intractable to them just a few weeks before. In laboratory class, we see dramatic improvement in the students in both the quality of their submitted work and in their functioning in the laboratory.
   • Student learning occurs when students start demanding more of themselves than my assignments demand of them, when students, no longer in my classes, seek me out to discuss books they've read, when students reach outside the classroom and even the university for learning by taking on internships in the community, writing for local publications, etc.
   • Student learning has occurred when they can demonstrate to their peers and to me how they have applied what they learned to the successful completion of a project.
   • One of the best metrics of how the students have absorbed the training procedures is their future performance.
   • Behavioral measures: the look in the face that reveals that something has fallen into place; written answers that reveal broad comprehension; results on objective tests in which the students scores well after the course, but clearly could not have before.

3. What measures can you suggest that reflect your EFFORT in educating undergraduate and/or graduate/professional students?
   • We need to introduce an valuable quality measure. What unusual things does UW do that enhance undergraduate education...
   • I don'’t understand the relevance of effort. Results are more interesting. An incompetent teacher could exceed all others in effort.
   • I'm happy to be measured by the evaluations of my students.
   • The best measure...would be the opinion of former students, some years after they had completed a particular class or course of study, as to how valuable it had proven to be over time to their general education and/or career.
   • University education is a collective process. I find it hard to measure MY success.
   • There should be some measure of innovation and timeliness.
   • In short, the success of my students is the only important measure of my effort at UW.
   • If you insist on effort measures, put in time clocks and count divorces. Then stand back and duck.
   • The most important thing that faculty members potentially do is to promote critical thinking by their students. The growth of critical thinking is not easily measured, and perhaps cannot be measured at all.

4. What measures of accountability in education do you think would be most useful?
   for departments or disciplines?
   for a College?
   for the University?
   • Accountability is not what is important. What we need is smaller courses so that we can teach. My class was designed for 30 students. Typically there are now 75-90 students.
   • Among our undergraduates, the important transition is when students make a connection between formal calculus, which they study in math courses, and applications of that math to problems in atmospheric sciences.
   • Among graduates, the important transition is when students start posing questions for themselves.
   • One would like to measure the increased insights that have resulted from the activities of the faculty, but that appears to be undefinable and unmeasurable.
   • I think that one measure of our undergraduate education is where students are in the five to ten year period after graduation. Could they have done the things they are doing without the university?
   • Conduct longitudinal surveys of its alumni to find out how they feel about the education they received 1, 2, 5 and 10 years after receiving their degree
   • I expect departments, colleges, and universities might be interested in student learning, but also in student motivation--do they go on in a field of study? Do they use this knowledge to contribute to society?
   • Having been around the university for a long time, I rather expect that superficial measures, probably quantitative, and therefore mistakenly thought to be objective, is what we will see as a result of this effort.
   • Overall, there must be more explicit rewards for teaching effort and effectiveness.
   • The university needs to solve problems of student access to courses by offering more courses and meeting the student demand for courses. The fact that students cannot get into required courses because we do not deploy the necessary teaching faculty to teach the courses is very poor press and deservedly so.
   • I submit "Accountability without standards is tyranny"
   • A university should be a place to nurture potential, and this is not something that is easily measured...
   • Feedback from companies who hire UW graduates.
   • Job placement rates for different departments and colleges
   • How well the UW prepares its graduates for their careers.
   • The quality of instruction, involvement of the full tenured professors in the direct teaching of undergraduate students, structure and size of classes along with demonstrable results might be areas of focused research and action that could assist in both improving the quality and results of the undergraduate experience.
   • Going back to the axiom that all politics is local, I would propose that with whatever measures are determined to be useful we do a sort by legislative district to identify how much of that effort goes to each legislator's constituency.
   • For graduate students, professional job placement is the obvious measure.
   • Here's an idea I once heard for a quantitative measure of effectiveness in teaching writing. Give a writing assignment to a randomized group of freshmen and a randomized group of seniors, have them read anonymously, and see if the readers can distinguish the seniors from the freshmen. It's a quick and dirty test, and in this form, doesn't have a control group. Still, if we can't tell the difference between freshmen and seniors, then we're in trouble and we should be aware of it, and if we can, then we know something is happening in those years.
   • I think it would be a mistake to measure accountability at the level of the individual faculty member. Good Departments have faculty with a variety of skills, abilities and interests. Good Chairs assign Departmental responsibilities differentially among these faculty members to achieve optimal performance at the level of the Department. Thus, I think accountability should be measured at the level of the Department.
   • A department which creates graduates that earn a lot of money is clearly a better investment than one that does not.
   • Probably every single inmate at Walla Walla has been on the front page of the Seattle Times, but rarely a top student. We have only ourselves to blame for this!
   • Comparison of salaries offered to recent graduates compared with those of other universities.
   • Results of Board examinations for medical students. Results of professional examinations, licensing exams

Service

Definition: "Activity appreciated by a community of interest that would not be provided if the University was not here."

1. Does this definition fit your service/outreach activity?

   If not, how would you define service/outreach activity?

2. Are service/outreach activities being measured in your unit? Should they be? If so, how? What narratives might be necessary to elaborate the measures?
   • ...there are many other institutions in the society that can and do provide service, and one should not forget that the university's unique mission in the preservation, creation, and transmission of knowledge. Service should be done only when it is directly related to that larger and unique knowledge mission.
   • Service is a part of accountability. Legislators should know, for example, that I and many other faculty work, during the summer when we are not paid, that we serve on volunteer boards and commissions and that's part of being a "teacher" in the community.
   • People do look at whether you are a hermit or are active in scientific societies etc.
   • Keep a list of times and dates of talks faculty give outside the U. Perhaps keep a file of comments these talks elicit.
   • This..is undervalued so much that individuals may not even come forward to serve in the faculty senate or in other governance roles. This can be addressed to some extent by valuing service more. While it can never be the equal of teaching or research it should be valued more than it is.
   • Yes, we measure service and outreach, with some pretty weird indicators, but what would one expect in a society that equates "community service" with punishment meted out to minor criminals. Again, it is the individual faculty member who rises above the departmental determinants to serve her/his community and not anything I see the School encouraging us to do (though lip service is certainly given to it).
   • I would treat service as a terrific bonus.

Research, Scholarship and Creative Contributions

1. What do you consider the most important measure (or measures) that describe your unit'’s research, scholarship and/or creative contributions?
   • The availability of "home pages" on the web provides an opportunity for faculty to highlight what they feel to be their important contributions...
   • Knowledge for knowledge sake should still be cherished and supported in the University.
   • Number and quality of patents.

2. How might these be expressed to a non-faculty audience?
   • Publicize major research findings in the press.
   • Scholarly publications and books and the amount of peer-reviewed research funding the faculty brings in.
   • One way that occurs to me is to create UW websites that list each faculty member's academic output, research interests, public service, etc. These websites should be set up so that they are easily indexed by the on-line search engines.
   • [Legislators] are probably more proud of our football team (when it is winning) than our research (which by $ measures is always winning.)
   • A continuously up-dated Web site with separate pages oriented to the major considerations different interest groups have when they think about the University: How many jobs and $'s does it bring into the State? How well is it supporting the needs of State industries in terms of trained graduates who become founders of companies, head of companies, etc.? How is it supporting the needs of the community in terms of doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, public information offers and their products such as organ transplants, environmental shields, computer systems, etc.

3. Should the UW publish a list of publications and creative contributions by all faculty? Should they be weighted? If so, by what factors? (Citation indices, performance reviews?)
   • National and international awards and publications should be highlighted. Also, awards and achievements of students.
   • No. Such a list will simply provide ammunition for those who think scholarship to be rubbish; and it will do nothing to assist the arguments of those who disagree. These competing attitudes toward the life of the mind are among the most critical divisions in American society. Such divisions are simply a fact of our lives.
   • Yes. Those that directly affect the region. It might be reasonable to weight these contributions by the amount of dollars contributed to the local and state economy.
   • Listing all research would make the University a target for amusement, like the Golden Fleece Award popularized by Congress.

4. How can the UW best show, descriptively and quantitatively, that its faculty research influences:
   -undergraduate teaching?
   -graduate teaching?
   -public service and outreach?
   • It should not be ignored that many undergraduates take research "classes", often working for multiple quarters with a faculty member and attend group meetings and departmental seminar series. These students get a special kind of education and stimulation whose value cannot be underestimated.
   • First rate residency training programs nationally can be identified by the amount of time faculty spends in education-oriented patient contact.
   • I think researchers, because they're staying current in their fields, can bring in that new material that might inspire the students to do something new and wonderful.
   • Research plays a role in service appearances. Presumably I get invited to speak to groups because of my expertise. Expertise brings status to the institution and it keeps my teaching well informed. Ultimately it means the public is kept well informed.
   • Percentages of graduates who receive offers in their primary field of interest.
   • High quality jobs that are created in the State of Washington because some of the faculty have research programs that bring in federal or corporate money.
   • How about putting a specific question on the student evaluation form that asks whether the student thinks the professor's scholarship or research improved the quality of this class or what the student learned? This could be dangerous, but it would encourage the faculty to take the case directly to the students.
   • Create and fund a score of $10,000 prizes to distribute among faculty each year and use each as a press/TV event. Cheap at the price.
   • UW could keep track of faculty publications in "top" journals as estimated by impact factor and also of articles that are frequently cited.
   • The difference between our university and a community college is that our faculty are active in their fields. In fact, all good universities have faculty that are active in the creation of knowledge in their fields. Students do not know how up to date a faculty member is. Because of this, it's important that we do research. Who wants to take a chemistry course from a chemistry professor who has never been in a lab?

Accountability Report Appendices

Provost's Committee on Accountability
provost@u.washington.edu
June 1997