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Evaluation and Assessment | Teaching Practices | Teaching with Technology | Resources for Funding
1. Evaluation and Assessment
1.3. Evaluation
Student Course Evaluations: 15 Common Beliefs & Misconceptions
- 1. Students cannot make consistent judgments about the instructors and instruction because of their immaturity, lack of experience, and capriciousness.
- Many studies indicate that the correlation between student ratings of the same instructors and courses range from 0.70 to 0.89.
- 2. Only colleagues with excellent publication records and expertise are qualified to teach and evaluate their peers' instruction.
- Research is divided: some have found weak positive correlations between research productivity and teaching effectiveness, while others have found no significant relationship.
- 3. Most student rating schemes are nothing more than a popularity contest, with the warm, friendly, humorous instructor emerging as the winner every time.
- Much of the research indicates that students are discriminating judges of instructional effectiveness: Aleamoni (1976) found that students frankly praised instructors for their warm, friendly, humorous manner, but if their courses were not well organized or their methods of stimulating students to learn were poor, students equally frankly criticized them in those areas.
- 4. Students are not able to make accurate judgments until they have been away from the course, or away from the university, for several years.
- Conducting research on this belief is difficult because it is hard to obtain a comparative and representative sample in longitudinal follow-up studies. The few studies done show that alumni who have been out of school 5 to 10 years rate instructors much the same as students currently enrolled.
- 5. Student rating forms are both unreliable and invalid.
- True for most of the student rating forms used today, which are "home-made" and thus haven't followed the rigorous psychometric and statistical procedures required to produce a well-developed instrument. Well-developed instruments have been shown to be both reliable and valid.
- 6. The size of the class affects student ratings.
- The research literature does not support the belief that a consistent relationship between class size and student ratings of any sort exists.
- 7. Students tend to rate higher those faculty who are of their same gender.
- No consistent relationship between gender of the student and the instructor in student ratings has emerged in the literature.
- 8. The time of day the course is offered affects student ratings.
- The limited research in this area indicates that the time of day the course is offered does not influence student ratings.
- 9. Whether students take the course as a requirement or as an elective affects their ratings.
- The bulk of the literature supports this belief: students who are required to take a course tend to rate it lower than students who elect to take it.
- 10. Whether students are majors or non-majors affects their ratings.
- The limited amount of research in this area indicates that there are no significant differences and no significant relationships between student ratings and whether they were majors or non majors.
- 11. The level of course affects student ratings.
- The majority of studies on this issue tend to support this belief. Some investigators report that graduate students and/or upper division students tend to rate instructors more favorably than did lower division students.
- 12. The rank of the instructor affects student ratings.
- The literature does not support this belief because no consistent relationship between faculty rank and student ratings has been found.
- 13. The grades students receive in a course are highly correlated with their ratings of the course and the instructor.
- This is the single most frequently researched issue on student ratings. Correlational studies have reported widely inconsistent grade-rating relationships.
- 14. Student ratings on single general items are accurate measures of instructional effectiveness.
- The limited amount of research suggests that the use of single general items should be avoided, especially for tenure, promotion or salary considerations.
- 15. Student ratings cannot meaningfully be used to improve instruction.
- The key finding is that ratings can be used to improve instruction if used as part of a personal consultation between the faculty member and a resource person.
Adapted from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence at Carnegie Mellon University
