Peer review plans should specify the process for the preparation of the peer review report. In the continuation report for 1995-1996, the Teaching Improvement Program advisory committee noted that all colleges had demonstrated difficulty defining peer evaluation of teaching as a component of the TIP evaluation process. In response, President Lombardi appointed a task force to develop general guidelines for peer review of teaching. This document reports the work of the Peer Review task force. It provides a necessary counterpoint and supplement to student evaluation data which are insufficient for the evaluation of faculty teaching performance.
Student evaluation provides access to the perceptions of competence by the recipients of teaching.
However, students often are not in a position to make judgments about the significance of the course content, nor the level of pedagogical expertise of their instructor as compared to others teaching similar courses. In addition, student perceptions will be colored by a variety of factors such as the size of the course, the difficulty and level of the course, and the nature of the subject matter. In contrast, peer review provides an evaluation of teaching performance which can help to contextualize and provide a way to interpret the meaning of student evaluation data. Analogous to peer review of scholarship during the tenure and promotion process, peer review of teaching is an external judgment about the quality of one s total teaching performance at a given point in time. The results of peer review shall be considered confidential personnel evaluation data.