Individual Development and Educational Assessment

Benchmarked Assessment Products for Higher Education

The success of your institution of higher education is the reason The IDEA Center exists. As a nonprofit organization, we have partnered since 1975 with colleges and universities across the country to reach the same goal — continuous individual and institutional improvement and achievement.

With a range of nationally normed, research-driven, flexible assessment services, The IDEA Center helps faculty members solicit feedback and evaluate teaching as it relates to curricular goals and the measurement of learning. We help faculty, deans, administrators, and department chairs assess how their own and the institution’s objectives are realized.

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News and Events

Where can you find representatives from The IDEA Center?
Monday, January 11, 2010 - 12:27pm

The next few months, staff form The IDEA Center will be traveling to a number of national conferences where they will be available to meet you, address your questions, and discuss the Center's products and resources. Here is where you can find us:

  • January 20-23, AAC&U Annual Meeting, Washington DC
  • February 11-12, Academic Chairpersons Conference, Orlando, FL
  • March 15-18, The Chair Academy, Minneapolis, MN
  • March 28-31, The League for Innovation, Baltimore, MD

If you won't be attending any of these meetings, please contact us and we'd be happy to talk to you (800-255-2757 or info@theideacenter.org).

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IDEA Research Published in The Department Chair
Friday, December 4, 2009 - 10:54am

Steve Benton, Senior Research Officer, recently published an article, along with his doctoral student, Jan Middendorf, in The Department Chair. (Middendorf, B. J. & Benton, S. L., "Trends in Chair Responsibilities," Fall 2009, Vol. 20, No. 2, pp. 23-25). They examined data collected from 1990 to 2007, using the IDEA Feedback for Department Chairs system. Results indicated that the importance chairs assigned to 15 responsibilities remained remarkably consistent across the years. In addition, chairs tended to receive the highest faculty ratings of their performance on the responsibilities chairs deemed most important. The strong relationship between chairs' ratings of importance and faculty ratings of performance supported the validity of The IDEA Feedback for Department Chairs system.

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POD Innovations Award Finalist Pam Milloy at Grand View University
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 - 10:12am

Congratulations to Pam Milloy at Grand View University who was a finalist for the POD Innovations Award at the 34th Annual Professional and Organizational Development (POD) Network in Higher Education Conference for her work “Looking Beyond a Single Class:  A Tool for Extracting Themes and Trends in Student Evaluation Data.” Ms. Milloy, Director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning, developed an Excel worksheet that allows professors to synthesize IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction results from numerous courses and semesters.  Instructors then draw a manageable number of teaching methods and styles they might consider to enhance learning.  The simple worksheet has markedly increased the attention that faculty are giving to improving their teaching.

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Training

Chairpersons Conference: February 11-12, 2010

The 27th Annual Academic Chairpersons Conference, co-sponsored by Kansas State University and The IDEA Center is scheduled for February 11-12, 2010 in Orlando, Florida.

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Knowledge Base

Best Practices

The IDEA Center receives numerous inquiries from prospective and current clients alike. One frequent question is, “In what ways have other campuses effectively used the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction system?” Some of those currently using IDEA shared some best practices from their experience.

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