Teaching Evaluation Readiness Assessment (TERA): Development of a Tool to Measure Faculty Readiness for Advancing Departmental Teaching Evaluation Practices

Inadequate teaching evaluation practices undermine a department's ability to encourage, recognize, and reward effective teaching. Adopting more robust and equitable evaluation practices can address this, but faculty often worry their colleagues will resist such changes. We describe the development of the Teaching Evaluation Readiness Assessment (TERA), a survey to measure faculty readiness for reforming departmental teaching evaluation practices. The TERA is grounded in the readiness for change framework from organizational management, which stipulates components that contribute to productive engagement with an organizational change. This survey is designed to measure the extent to which faculty: (a) see value in teaching evaluation reform for themselves and their department, (b) feel their department would be capable of successfully changing teaching evaluation practices, and (c) perceive that their department head would be supportive of these changes. We used existing instruments, expert review, think-aloud interviews, exploratory factor analysis, confirmatory factor analysis, and comparisons across time and departments to develop the TERA and gather evidence of its validity as a measure of faculty readiness to change teaching evaluation. Findings suggest readiness for reform may be higher than what faculty and change agents perceived anecdotally. We discuss how the TERA can serve change agents and researchers.