The researchers analyzed data from a basic-algebra course at Phoenix from 2001 to 2014, using such measures as students’ scores on a standard final examination, their performance in a subsequent algebra course, and their evaluations of teaching...High-quality instruction didn’t necessarily predict positive feedback on student evaluations, the researchers found. Instead, high marks on evaluations instructors tended to be rewarded with high ratings if they gave good grades.were most positively correlated with students’ grades in a course, meaning that
What a surprise (If you ignore previous studies like this one and this one and this particularly infuriating one)!
What's the answer, though? The current system encourages grade inflation, handing out cookies, and coming to class disguised as a white guy (a high-stakes tactic that can backfire when you sneeze and your fake mustache shoots across the classroom). The most fair measure seems like it would be student performance on a standard final content exam measured against predicted performance (that last part is important; otherwise the incentive is to pressure your struggling students to drop the class).
How do we measure good teaching?
--Frankie Bow
I think there's only one way: we have to take each other's classes.
ReplyDeleteSo that' won't happen - although I'd LOVE to sit in on some subjects, there is absolutely no way I have time to do it, unless Admin decides to pony up the course release time. Which won't happen.
You let people who understand it evaluate it, even if it means taking money out of the student retention fund and putting it in the assessment fund. I've been in scores of other instructor's classrooms. I'm not a genius, but I know enough to tell if an instructor is doing a "good" job or not, and I usually have some ideas on things he/she can improve.
ReplyDeleteDuring my administrative years I knew the real value of evals, and I always had at least one Dean or Provost who gave a shit about teaching, and we found a way to reward and promote and hire people who were helping students, not placating or entertaining them.
We'd have to blow up the student as consumer model, though, and from what I've seen, that ship has sailed. It's sailed so much one can't even see it on the horizon anymore. That thing is gone.
Yep. Batshit U is heading way over into this territory, after years of mildly dumb but benign classroom surveys.
ReplyDeleteOne item on the survey will now be a feature of all promotion decisions. And there's a numerical target to hit, regardless of subject, students, context (or, indeed, reality).