Talk:Making Better Use of Student Evaluations of Teachers

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Is this useful to share with faculty?

Elbow says: "When we stop pretending to measure a complex performance along one numerical scale, we naturally bring in more useful valuative information. That is, we are led to create student evaluations that focus on questions such as these: how well does this teacher conduct discussions, give lectures, devise assignments, comment on papers, help you understand the course concepts and information...Even if we are forced to ask for numerical answers to these questions because there are too many students to permit us to read written answers, we don't pretend we can add up these numbers and come out with a “score” for how good the teacher is. We realize that the results need interpretation." (emphasis added)

This is well and good, and fits with the conversation Gary is having with CAHNRS chairs. This is all well and good, but how do instructors, or others, do the work of meaningful interpretation? Does one need to look at interaction among more than one variable, or can each be examined independently?

Elbow answers the problem of ranking for merit pay raises, lump the data into something holistic, then chunk the results into three coarse bins:

"After all, for the sake of important decisions in areas such as hiring, promotion, tenure, and merit pay, we often need to make the best estimate we can about who is an excellent teacher and who is a genuinely poor or irresponsible one. Such decisions can never be wholly trustworthy, but they are not so problematic as fine-grain rankings in the middle range."

Seems that could work fairly well Nils Peterson 08:44, 5 Oct 2005 (Pacific Daylight Time)

Using data not obtained from the student directly

I like Elbow's suggestions:

"But I assume that each evaluation committee would send a member to visit the classes of the teachers allotted to it, would get examples of the teachers' assignments and of their comments on student writing, and would also look at the teachers' grading (as well as probably getting evaluations from a sprinkling of former students). And—very important—the committees would get immeasurable help from seeing reflective statements by teachers about their strengths and weaknesses as teachers and about how they've developed since the last such statements."

Certainly we in CTLT see the products of assignments and infer the nature of the assignment. One such spectrum is: Work-for-the-teacher vs authentic-work, and in the latter we can guage deeper, more meaninful (lasting?) learning. Nils Peterson 08:54, 5 Oct 2005 (Pacific Daylight Time)

Notes from the Daily Grind meeting

Elbow talks about informal peer evaluation among the faculty. We began to talk about peer evaluation by the students in the classroom. One issue there is large classes, where the class size drives the format of the exam, which results in the multiple choice test prevailing over essay questions. One of the reasons for this is lack of instructor's time to grade essay questions, and unwillingness to enable students to peer-evaluate one another if an essay exam is given. The general trend is to opt for a solution that yields to the instructor's convictions with regard to grading (i.e., that he/she has to do it), rather than to a better test. One key question that was mentioned was, what does more damage -- violation of the instructor's grading philosophy, or a test that requires no critical thinking? (It is difficult to respond without leaning on personal bias, but this is what makes it a good question.)

Going off on the critical thinking tangent - one earlier MRG discussion on vocationalism came to mind. The reason for teaching CT seems linked to the perspective on the function of education (in this case higher ed). One sensitive question there is: Why should CT be central in undergraduate education, when many if not most job opportunities for college grads require very little of it? A vast number of jobs can be adequately performed with minimum critical thinking (this is my perception). Rental car company clerks. TV station control room operators. Retail sales. AmEx financial consultants. And so forth. Any established company or institution has enough rules built into the job routine to prevent intentional or unintentional deviation from the way things are done. To rule out change. To play the devil's advocate, according to this view, would CT not be more important at the graduate/doctoral level, when socialization into a culture of following the rules begins to transition into one of inquiry, analysis, and exploration (in both academic and professional settings)? (I am not talking about the way things should be, but the current state.) --Amorozov 10:06, 5 Oct 2005 (Pacific Daylight Time)

This is looking more like a conversation with self. To form my own answer to the question above, I jotted down some thoughts here.--Amorozov 08:44, 6 Oct 2005 (Pacific Daylight Time)