Tue, Jul 26, 2005

ADEPT Tool for reducing conflicts over the awarding of university tenure

Georgia Tech has developed an multimedia toolset that they hope will help ease the tensions and conflict associated with a faculty member’s quest for tenure at their university. Known as ADEPT (Awareness of Decisions in Evaluating Promotion and Tenure), the instrument is a tool that allows learners to participate in simulated promotion and tenure committee meetings. One of the primary goals of the instrument is to assist users in identifying forms of bias in evaluation processes to achieve fair and objective evaluations. It consists of a downloadable application package (currently PC only, with Mac version “coming soon”) that contains case studies (also viewable separately from the application) and related activities appropriate for group discussion or individual use by candidates, members of committees, and other faculty.

ADEPT presents two sets of activities, those designed to enhance a candidate’s abilities to prepare his/her record for evaluation (called “Navigate Your Career”), and those designed to help members of unit-level promotion and tenure committees understand the subtleties of bias in the evaluation process (called “Simulated Meeting/Cases and Questions”).  The candidate portion of ADEPT includes guidance in building a strong dossier, while the committee member activity involves the user in fictional evaluation meetings featuring mock P&T case studies.

These ADEPT activities are linked to an annotated bibliography of research focusing on a broad range of forms of bias related to gender, ethnicity, choice of publication venues, engagement in interdisciplinary research, assignment of service activities, allocation of resources, mentoring, disability, and more.

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