Profformance Assessment tool

The PROFFORMANCE Assessment Tool provides a complex picture of teacher performance. This comprehensive, flexible, adaptive, and formative tool navigates among the different requirements of higher education policies and stakeholders. It gives feedback for individual teachers and in the case of wide-scale surveys provides data for evidence-based decision-making at various (institutional, national or even regional) levels. 

Self, staff, and student evaluation are carried out in 6 areas: 

  • course development, 

  • teaching and learning, 

  • student evaluation, 

  • research and social responsibility, 

  • professional development, 

  • organization, 

  • administration. 

The tool's horizontal aspects, alongside the main European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and new European Union priorities, are digitalization, inclusion, sustainability, and internationalization.

>> tool.profformance.eu

The Assessment Tool was elaborated by the PROFFORMANCE consortium with the collaboration of 11 partners and more than 20 outstanding international experts. The project aimed to elaborate a joint criteria model for an assessment tool for teachers’ performance that may be customized to Higher Education Institutions own needs in all European Higher Education Area (EHEA) countries. The development process started in November 2020 and finished in October 2021. PROFFORMANCE experts worked together online synchronously in the frame of peer learning activities and working group meetings and asynchronously on online co-working platforms with the involvement of external experts and stakeholders as well. After collecting teachers' tasks and roles, the structurization and rationalization process started and the EU and EHEA priorities have been defined as horizontal aspects. Finally, upon the model of the self-assessment version of the assessment tool, the peer and student versions have been adjusted as well. 

The result is a well-rounded assessment tool for higher education teachers’ performance evaluation, that covers a wide range of activities related to teaching and learning. It evaluates teachers’ performance from the view of the teachers themselves, their peer colleagues, their students, and it offers the possibility to draw attention to the European Union’s and European Higher Education Area’s priorities such as: digitalization, internationalization, inclusion, and sustainability. 

The tool will be useful to complement or be embedded into the existing quality assurance systems of the HEIs, and it is a tool to be used for teacher performance evaluation with special regard to T&L in international cooperation such as strategic partnerships, joint or double degrees, knowledge alliances or the newly formed European University Alliances. The tool will provide data on strengths and weaknesses at individual and institutional level and provides evidence for (further)developing institutional T&L strategies, teacher performance and career management systems and in-service and further training. 

The international project to develop a teaching performance assessment tool will continue under the name PROFFORMANCE+, with an enlarged range of partners, professional events, and further development of PROFFORMANCE products. The project, which will run from 2022 to 2025, will add new features to the PROFFORMANCE Assessment Tool. It will become more flexible and customizable and allow targeted assessment of competencies related to specific priority areas.