ED and Principal Investigator at COACHE, R. Todd Benson, Co-Authors New Book on Faculty Training
Evaluating Educational Development: A Comprehensive and Data-Driven Approach for Colleges and Universities shows how educational developers can use data to monitor and demonstrate the impact of their work, laying the foundation for evidence-based decisions to improve practice.
Published by Routledge, the book includes activities, templates and examples that illustrate how to evaluate educational development work. It equips readers with everything they need to develop a comprehensive evaluation plan, and provides direction for the collection, management and use of evaluation data.
A guide for any educational developer who wishes to create evaluation plans that draw out data to inform their work, inspire improved practice, and showcase value across the higher education landscape.
Evaluating Educational Development: A Comprehensive and Data-Driven Approach for Colleges and Universities will be released in December, 2024. Pre-order a copy for your institution here.
Find out what early users of the book have to say:
Hurney, Mullinix, and Benson have authored a must-read book for institutions committed to evidence-based educational development. It offers a powerful research and practice-based lens on evaluating the work of CTLs. It made me think differently and more inclusively about the evaluation approaches I’ve used throughout my entire career. Read this book. It is a wonderful gift to educational developers dedicated to thoughtfully assessing the impact and outcomes of educational development.
Mary Deane Sorcinelli, Ed.D., Associate Provost for Faculty Development and Founding Director of Center for Teaching and Learning (1988-2014); Professor, Educational Policy, Research & Leadership (2006-2014) University of Massachusetts Amherst; POD Network President (2000-2002)
This is the guide to evaluation I wish I could have read when I was directing a center for teaching and learning. The book provides both big picture and practical details for constructing an evaluation plan, and I really appreciate the emphasis on using existing institutional data as part of that plan.
Derek Bruff, Ph.D., higher education consultant, author of Intentional Tech: Principles to Guide the Use of Educational Technology in College Teaching, producer of the Intentional Teaching podcast
Evaluating Educational Development: A Comprehensive and Data-Driven Approach for Colleges and Universities is an important new resource which has many audiences but especially higher education professionals who work in college and university educational development centers. I have had the privilege of helping to create or transform five university educational development centers and have supervised four of them over a span of 20 years. During that time, in US higher education, centers such as these went from peripheral novelties to central players in high performing colleges and universities.
Performance metrics are the lingua franca of these organizations. Evaluating Educational Development helps educational developers to speak that language. More significantly, this new book helps practitioners to do the good work of educational development (in its many forms) ever more effectively. This thorough, articulate, clearly organized, and profoundly practical book is a significant addition to the higher education literature. R. Buckminster Fuller (1899-1989) observed, “If you want to teach people a new way of thinking… give them a tool, the use of which will lead to new ways of thinking.” This book is such a tool. I recommend it highly.
Douglas L. Robertson, Ph.D., Professor of Higher Education (2008-present) and University Undergraduate Dean (2008-2016), Florida International University, Miami, Florida; author, Making Learning, Lessons Learned: An Intellectual Memoir on Developing as a College Teacher 2023)
Look no further! Finally, all the pieces of evaluating a teaching & learning center are gathered into a very accessible step-by-step handbook that ties together key research on center evaluation approaches and a much-needed expanded explanation of the POD-ACE Center for Teaching and Learning Matrix. Providing open-access spreadsheets that any center or office can adapt to their unique needs, this book hands us information and tools that identify and make visible data that when analyzed can celebrate current and past successes and guide future directions. Even though time and resources are still a challenge to conducting evaluation, this book shows us an easy next step to being able to tell our own stories.
Eli Collins-Brown, Ed.D., Director, Coulter Faculty Commons, Western Carolina University
I am most impressed with the scope and depth of insight to be found in Evaluating Educational Development: A Comprehensive and Data-Driven Approach for Colleges and Universities as well as the range of specific tools that Mullinix, Hunley, and Benson provide. I have worked in the field of Educational Development in Higher Education for more than 30 years, 18 of those directing the central educational development unit at The Ohio State University. Throughout my career, I have been asked to provide evidence of the usefulness of our work, to justify the expenditure of scare institutional resources on this effort.
For much of this time, each center had to invent its own assessment processes, ad hoc. There were very few shared models and fewer tools available in the literature for us to use. My own team, in 2004, began developing and publishing on building custom databases that allowed us to name and collect data on the specific elements of our work that we believed mattered. While we continued to refine this project for years, it was primarily focused on our specific instance; generalizing to be easily adaptable across the field was more than we ever fully achieved.
While serving as an external reviewer for several other centers during the 2000’s and early 2010’s, I saw that the field was struggling with defining appropriate goals and outcome, and part of the problem was that much of the assessment was driven not by outcomes defined by the educational developers, but more by to questions being asked by senior administrators with other agendas. Evaluating Educational Development offers structured processes for devising the right goals and outcomes to support a unit’s Mission.
Evaluating Educational Development looks to be the work which will provide members of the educational development community the intellectual and practical tools to engage in effective, persuasive, evidence-based assessment to drive improvement and planning and to demonstrate outcomes and impact.
Alan Kalish, Ph.D. Assistant Vice Provost, Undergraduate Education (2018-present), Director, University Center for the Advancement of Teaching (2000-2018), Adjunct Associate Professor, Educational Studies (2014-present), The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH.
I wish this book had been available when I started my work with Faculty/Teaching development in 1973. At that time, we were focused on trying to get people to understand what Faculty/Teaching development was and laying the groundwork for our field. Since then the field has grown substantially and we have seen educational development colleagues bring creative thinking to bear on improving learning at all levels of our institutions. This book is one such example. There is no doubt that the information in this book will help to grow the field faster by developing EDU professionals who can identify effective places and track needed changes and develop important evaluation skills. This book brings the skills of evaluation and research to the fore and offers mechanisms for EDUs to gather data and explore challenges to base decisions and practice on evidence and strengthen their efforts overall.
Readers who fully embrace and implement the ideas offered in this book will succeed in growing their EDUs. They will discover and document both what they do well and ways to improve. Moreover, they will have ideas and encouragement for how to collaborate with various groups and units across the institution and strategies for using documented successes and evidence-based arguments to advocate for the EDU and teaching and learning on campuses and beyond. Using data effectively as this book lays out, offers a pathway to move past “we always did it this way” and towards data-driven improvements so we can do better. At its core, this book shows what’s possible and offers a practical path forward with such clarity that were I still teaching graduate students, this would be a book we would use, as the ideas are relevant for any project, activity or program.
The structure and format of this book helps the reader to understand and apply the strategies, adapting them to their specific contexts and needs. The logical sequence and structure of the chapters further support this. The opening abstracts provide overviews with the “what, why, and how” of the chapter focus. By sharing specific examples and real life cases the authors invite readers to see themselves and connect with the process. The templates and activities the authors introduce engage readers in applying the ideas shared to their own EDU challenges. The consistency of order and flow helps readers to move through the book taking what they need and are ready for, what matches their EDU’s stage of development, and leaving the rest for future work. Through both the examples offered and explicit statements, the authors encourage this thoughtful determination of what might be most applicable and what might not, leaving readers in the driver's seat of evaluation.
Overall, Evaluating Educational Development offers a clear and well-scaffolded guide to both new and seasoned educational developers who are either preparing to embark on evaluating their work or are ready to revisit and refine how they approach the design, collection and use of data to inform evidence-based decisions and reporting practices. Grounded in the ethical core of educational development, this book offers a long absent tool and insights that promises to strengthen the credibility and longevity of our work and the field.
Marilla D. Svinicki, Ph.D., Director of Center of Teaching Effectiveness (1973-2004); Full Faculty, Educational Psychology (2004-2014) University of Texas at Austin; POD Network President (1987–1989)