If you are looking for teaching evaluations, please contact the Registrar's Office, 734-647-3626.

Supporting Evidence-Based Teaching and Learning at U-M

Contact us: crlt@umich.edu

CRLT’s assessment and evaluation work closely aligns with its mission by supporting evidence-based learning and teaching practices that create learning environments in which diverse students and instructors can excel.

CRLT works with faculty and administrators in all 19 schools and colleges, as well as the Provost’s Office, on assessment and evaluation of U-M student learning outcomes and experiences.

CRLT-Engin has an in-depth focus on supporting and conducting educational research in the College of Engineering.

All of our projects have three defining characteristics:

• The focus is on improving U-M student learning experiences or outcomes, directly or indirectly.
• We work in collaboration with faculty and academic units, guided by their learning goals.
• Projects are action-oriented, with the objective of generating evidence that is useful for faculty and administrators to improve courses or curricula. Some of this work is published, but most is designed to be shared in venues such as faculty retreats or department meetings, where key curricular decisions get made.

We offer the following services to support assessment and evaluation of U-M students and programs:

• Assessment projects, involving approaches such as surveys, focus groups, and analysis of student work or learning analytics data
• Research on key topics in engineering education and innovative assessment approaches
• Retreat facilitation to enable faculty to plan or revise curricula
• Grants and learning communities, such as Investigating Student Learning and the Gilbert Whitaker Fund, reading groups for faculty exploring engineering education research, and participation in campus committees (e.g., REBUILD) to support faculty as evidence-based instructors
• Evaluation of U-M IT tools, to help the university make evidence-based recommendations about the adoption of new technologies and best pedagogical use of them
• Evaluation for educational grants, which includes consulting on TLTC assessment plans and assisting faculty with broader impacts statements and evaluation plans for NSF projects
• Consultations on topics such as overall project formulation and survey and focus group design
• Resources, such as websites on best practices for curriculum design, existing data sources available for assessment, and getting started with engineering education research

Examples of recent CRLT and CRLT-Engin projects at various levels include:

Faculty scholarship of teaching and learning projects
CRLT’s support had an impact on every student that walks in through our doors in the fall — and it also got me a couple of publications!
–Former Investigating Student Learning Grantee, CoE

Engineering education research
Engineering education research activities are clearly flourishing at U-M, and CRLT-Engin’s leadership is one of the major reasons why!
–CoE faculty member

Evaluation of IT tools
Your work serves to more deeply evaluate Canvas as a tool to encourage instructional transformation and to evaluate our support model’s effectiveness. 
–ITS Teaching and Learning

Assessment of student learning outcomes and experiences
We definitely utilized that survey to its fullest, and we are quite proud of our accomplishments.  …
From everything I can see, the changes have been extremely positive, and the feedback from students has been great.
–Department of History, recognized for the project by two LSA awards