Abstract:

In Spain, we consider to be an important influencing factor in the university system the creation of the national and autonomic professorship accreditation and assessment agencies. Under the assumption that evaluation influences the processes in which it is implied, we would like to study what aspects of the current system of faculty access and promotion affect the individual (faculty), group (department) and institutional trajectory (University).
We suppose that the emergence of these agencies has modified the profiles of the teachers and researchers personal of the universities en the last years and also the life of departments and institutional dynamics.

Our working hypotheses are:

-Access and promotion requisites derived from external evaluations of professorship affect not only the professor career, but also groups, departments and the university dynamics.
-The assessment processes influence in the professorship development and especially the practicing of the teaching and researching function.
-Also, there exists a discrepancy between the teaching dedication needs of the institutions and the evaluation paths, which emphasize research production.

General objective:
To study the individual, group and institutional repercussion of the external evaluation of professorship in the University.

Specific objectives:
1. To identify changes and transformations in university, groups, and individuals culture as a consequence of the external assessment policies.
2. To study the professorship curricula evolution in the ambit of Social, Law and Economic Sciences, and in Humanities, since the agencies creation.
3. To generate a model for curricula classifying and categorizing.
4. To analyze the assessment criteria of the diverse agencies and the national and autonomic assessment institutions.
5. To study changes produced in the university functioning units (departments, knowledge areas) because of assessments produced by the external agencies.
6. To analize possible repercussions of the conditions generated by the external evaluations in the university authonomy condition.

Methodology

This is a descriptive-exploratory study that will be conducted in Catalan state universities. We will study different accredited teacher categories but also the assessments of the teachers’ teaching merits issued by the Autonomic Agency of University Quality (AQU) and those of research issued by CENAI and AQU.

The units of analysis will be the academic careers of university professorship.

Information triangulation will be based in the analysis of the curricula of professorship, teaching innovation groups, recognized research groups and departments. Interviews to responsible persons and experts and an analysis of the evaluations informs and other related documents will be performed.