Evaluating dental faculty performance: perceptions of dental school deans

Area of Science:

• Dental Education
• Academic Medicine
• Faculty Performance Evaluation

Background:

• Dental schools face increasing pressure to emphasize research productivity for faculty.
• Understanding faculty and dean perceptions of performance criteria is crucial for effective academic advancement.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare how dental deans rank performance criteria versus how they perceive faculty would rank them.
• To identify discrepancies in the perceived importance of teaching and research in dental faculty evaluation.

Main Methods:

• 57 deans from 67 U.S. and Canadian dental schools participated.
• Deans ranked 12 performance criteria twice: their personal ranking and their perception of faculty ranking.
• Spearman's rank-order correlation was used to assess agreement between rankings.

Main Results:

• High overall agreement (Spearman's rho = .92) was found between deans' personal and perceived faculty rankings.
• Deans ranked teaching (classroom, clinical, laboratory) as first, while perceiving faculty would rank publications first.
• Deans ranked publications fourth, whereas they perceived faculty would rank it first and teaching third.

Conclusions:

• A significant discrepancy exists between deans' personal priorities and their perception of faculty priorities regarding research and teaching.
• This perception gap has implications for faculty evaluation, recruitment, and retention in dental academia.
• Addressing this discrepancy is vital given the university's emphasis on research for dental faculty advancement.