The Biggest Detriment of Student Evaluations
I have written elsewhere on student evaluations. This is the first day of final exams for my institution, so I had to remind my students this morning that it is also the last day for them to complete the online evaluations.
I could write a volume on this process, and perhaps one day I will, because I plan to write a book entitled Inspirational Teaching in an Age of Assessment.
Student evals have their place. They can be of value in quality improvement for the individual teacher if the instrument is good and comments are looked at more than numbers. They also alert administrators (like me) to patterns of problems. If one student says the professor is a jerk (as has happened to me), I don't care. If ten do in a year, that means something.
There are many things wrong with student evals. They commodify education, the opinions of 18-year-olds are given too much weight, and they should never be used as the primary method of assessment of an instructor. But I want to mention here what I think is the worst.
They stifle innovation in teaching, and they cause us to teach from a position of fear.
An instructor with good evaluations knows that if he or she tries something different--high impact practices, for example--it may not work, and that might lead to student complaints and lower evals.
I say this because I led a session on high impact practices yesterday (I'm working on a guidebook about it with some colleagues). Two professors who had piloted a high impact approach this semester talked about the major push back from students. One had used collaborative learning in a basic psychology class, and it sounded like a well designed project; the other had used service learning in a social media communication class. In the second, the students had resented having to help nonprofits with their social media strategies; however, by the end of the semester they had changed their tunes and saw how much their help was needed by these organizations.
In both cases the instructors (both women) expressed real concern about how this would affect their evals. I believe this is a real issue for consideration by higher education administrators if they want innovation and course redesign.
I could write a volume on this process, and perhaps one day I will, because I plan to write a book entitled Inspirational Teaching in an Age of Assessment.
Student evals have their place. They can be of value in quality improvement for the individual teacher if the instrument is good and comments are looked at more than numbers. They also alert administrators (like me) to patterns of problems. If one student says the professor is a jerk (as has happened to me), I don't care. If ten do in a year, that means something.
There are many things wrong with student evals. They commodify education, the opinions of 18-year-olds are given too much weight, and they should never be used as the primary method of assessment of an instructor. But I want to mention here what I think is the worst.
They stifle innovation in teaching, and they cause us to teach from a position of fear.
An instructor with good evaluations knows that if he or she tries something different--high impact practices, for example--it may not work, and that might lead to student complaints and lower evals.
I say this because I led a session on high impact practices yesterday (I'm working on a guidebook about it with some colleagues). Two professors who had piloted a high impact approach this semester talked about the major push back from students. One had used collaborative learning in a basic psychology class, and it sounded like a well designed project; the other had used service learning in a social media communication class. In the second, the students had resented having to help nonprofits with their social media strategies; however, by the end of the semester they had changed their tunes and saw how much their help was needed by these organizations.
In both cases the instructors (both women) expressed real concern about how this would affect their evals. I believe this is a real issue for consideration by higher education administrators if they want innovation and course redesign.
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