Since August 1, 1975, The IDEA Center, Manhattan, Kan., has quietly, efficiently and systematically gathered data and offered feedback for faculty improvement in hundreds of thousands of college and university classes. The brainchild of one psychology professor who believed that student learning, rather than student whims, should be the yardstick of faculty evaluation, the IDEA Student Ratings of Instruction has spun off a suite of improvement feedback instruments currently used in 370 colleges and universities.
In 1968, Donald Hoyt, Ph.D., faculty member and administrator at Kansas State University in Manhattan, began creating a student ratings of teaching instrument that looked at student learning relative to an instructor’s objectives, rather than simply measuring an instructor’s behaviors or popularity.
