Evaluating dental faculty performance: perceptions of dental school deans

In this study 57 deans in 67 United States and Canadian Dental Schools ranked, in decreasing order of importance, 12 performance criteria and then ranked the same 12 criteria as they perceived faculty would rank them. Agreement between the deans' two global rankings gave a Spearman's rank-order correlation of .92. Although the general level of agreement between the two perceptual ranks was significant, several important discrepancies in rank order were identified. Deans perceived that faculty would rank number of publications first and classroom, clinical, and laboratory teaching third. Deans personally ranked classroom, clinical, and laboratory teaching as first and number of publications as fourth. Implications of the discrepancy between the perceived importance of research productivity and teaching in faculty evaluation were discussed with respect to the increasing emphasis placed on research for dental faculty within the university.