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Data-Informed Partnerships Drive Faculty Impact

Data Fuels Every ACUE Partnership 

Our institutional partners share our view that the only approach to student success that works is one grounded in efficacy. That means that we don’t just check our students’ work; we continuously check ours, too. 

Association of College and University Educators (ACUE) has developed an accountability method designed to evaluate the impact of faculty development on teaching practices and student outcomes. This six-level evaluation approach is grounded in the industry training model of Kirkpatrick and Kirkpatrick (2007) and informed by Guskey’s (2000) and Hines’s (2011) application to educational settings. The six levels are (a) faculty engagement, (b) faculty learning, (c) faculty implementation, (d) student engagement, (e) course-level student outcomes, and (f) institutional outcomes. ACUE developed this approach in order to conduct research-based evaluations of its partnerships with colleges and universities where faculty are credentialed through ACUE’s courses in evidence-based instruction.

Read more about our Evaluation Framework

See Our Results
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Insights ACUE Delivers

We work with institutions to evaluate the impact that the ACUE courses they adopt have on student success in areas like retention, equity gaps, DFW rates, and learning outcomes.

Our services to partners to inform the impact of ACUE-credentialed faculty include the following types of research opportunities:

ACUE regularly surveys ACUE-credentialed faculty to understand the impact that ACUE credentials have on learners. Research includes surveying along dimensions of impact on teaching, use of practices learned, and benefit to students.

ACUE supports institutions in their measurement of student outcomes, so they can report on the degree to which students are completing more courses, earning better grades, and demonstrating authentic indicators of learning. This level of analysis seeks to determine how stronger instruction—a variable within an instructor’s and institution’s control—promotes students’ academic success. This research measures changes in students’ academic achievement (e.g., grades, course completion).

ACUE’s Student Survey Center helps us evaluate the overall impact of the ACUE course, and student feedback collected from the ACUE Student Questionnaire can be useful as another point of feedback for faculty from their students.

Starting in 2023:

  • Option to generate separate survey links and reports for different course sections
  • Add benchmarking data of comparable students to reports

ACUE Student Survey Shows No Evidence of Bias 

We test for potential racial and gender bias in our own tools and regularly pilot new ways to improve our survey instruments.

ACUE first included questions about race/ethnicity and gender identity on the faculty enrollment survey in fall 2020. Since that time, ACUE has been committed to testing for potential racial and gender bias on the instructional practices scale of the ACUE student survey and regularly piloting new items to support the continuous improvement of our survey instruments. Analyses from the fall 2021 and spring 2022 semesters of student surveys from full courses do not show any evidence of racial or gender bias.

View Brief

For the past 5 years, ACUE has annually analyzed the institutional, programmatic, and individual characteristics of more than 16,000 faculty across the United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada as associated with their participation in ACUE certification programs.

What is Our Partner Data Proving?
ACUE Courses Work.

Together with our partners—hundreds of colleges and universities around the country—we’re constantly measuring and using what we learn to evolve and improve our courses and microcredentials so faculty have the best chance of impacting students. We’re proud of the mark ACUE faculty are making on higher education. 

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“Many of our faculty are involved in the research themselves,

so for them to see the data behind these teaching methods and the impact it’s making at other colleges and universities was really important.”

Dr. Cynthia Nicholson, Norfolk State University

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