The Sunday NY Times had an interesting article that included summaries of various studies about how students evaluate teaching. I think my favorite is the study where a charming, witty and credentialed "professor" (they call him Dr. Myron Fox, but he is really an actor) talks nonsense to people for an hour, and is rated highlyby other professors and graduate students, many of whom felt they really learned something! Perhaps more useful (but less fun) are the studies that show that giving students chocolate (or all A grades) before the evaluations results in higher scores (are we really surprised?). The chocolate study is called "The Fudging the Numbers," proving that social scientists have a sense of humor, albeit a weakish one.
The article is interesting reading for anyone at a school where student evaluations are the primary resource for evaluating teaching. You can read it here, I believe without a subscription.
I was sorry not to see Debbie Merritt's article on Bias, the Brain and Student Evaluations given a mention -- if you haven't seen this article, it is a must read. Here, at SSRN.
It was especially relevant to the article's thesis that teachers of more controversial courses (like those about race and gender issues) tend to have a cadre of very negative students who are hostile to the message of the course and cream them on evaluations. I know this happens, but I truly don't understand it. These students chose to take the course! One of the courses in the Times article was The History of Minstrelsy at Wesleyan (even Wesleyan doesn't require it, so it is an elective). Why would you take a course like this if you didn't want to learn about the material? To be fair, one of the evaluations complained that the professor was late to class because of her yoga class (not making this up), so some of the hostility might have been well-earned. But I can imagine Dr. Myron Fox getting a pass for similar behavior (perhaps he was late because of a vigorous game of squash).
In any event, all of these studies should give us real pause about the utility of student evaluations. I think it is very, very important to give students a voice, but I think the way the evaluation is structured -- and how the questions are asked -- is so critical, and I'm not sure we've found the right formula yet. And, I tend to agree with some of the commentators in the Times article that overuse of evaluation numbers to assess teaching is lazy and unproductive (you are going to weed out good teachers).
But, hey, now that we all know about the "Fudge Factor" (damn my secret is out), we'll all be on the upswing...
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