Re: Are student evaluations useful?

[Maurice Barnhill <mvb@UDel.Edu>]

In a very well-thought-out and useful posting, =

hake@ix.netcom.com wrote:
> =

> .. =

> In a 11/17/97 PhysLrnR posting of the above title Kyle Forinash asks
> for
> good references which show the usefulness of student evaluations in
> determining teaching effectiveness.  =

> ... [deletions]
> As for references which purport to show the usefulness of student
> evaluations in gauging student learning, Cohen (7) in a much quoted
> meta-analysis of 41 studies on 68 separate multisection courses
> claimed
> that =93the average correlation between an overall instructor rating an=
d
> student achievement was +0.43; the average correlation between an
> overall course rating and student achievement was +0.47...the
> results...provide strong support for the validity of student ratings
> as
> measures of teaching effectiveness.=94  However, there are at least
> three
> problems with Cohen=92s analysis: (a) the grading satisfaction
> hypothesis
> discussed by Marsh (8) (students who are aware that they will receive
> high grades reward their instructors with favorable evaluations) could
> account, at least in part, for the positive correlation, =


Of course, it is also entirely possible that most students do want to
learn something, even if not always what or as much as we are teaching,
that they are decent judges of whether or not they have learned
anything, and that they fill out evaluations accordingly.  Then if we
reward them for learning what we asked them to learn by giving them good
grades, the correlation between student evaluations and grades simply
mean that the two of us agree on whether or not they are learned
something.  =


In view of this possibility, I think we should be disturbed if grades
and student evaluations are *not* correlated, rather than being upset if
they are.

> (b) there was
> no pretesting to disclose initial knowledge states, (c) the quality of
> the =93achievement tests=94 was not examined (were they of the
> plug-in-regurgitation type so common in introductory physics
> courses?).
> ....
-- =

Maurice Barnhill, mvb@udel.edu                =

http://www.physics.udel.edu/~barnhill/          =

Physics Dept., University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716