Student Evaluations Aren’t Useless. They’re Just Poorly Used.
By Jonathan Malesic
If it’s early May, then it must be time to talk about what student evaluations of teaching are worth. In a recent essay
in Slate, Rebecca Schuman claims that student evaluations are “useless”
in their current form, because they encourage students to punish
rigorous teachers with low scores and mean comments (and, all too often,
sexist or racist ones). The article has gotten a lot of attention from
academics I know, who have shared their own stories of uninformed and
upsetting comments.
Schuman argues that in light of the unreliability of evaluations, it
is unjust to base hiring, firing, and promotion on them. This is
especially true for graduate students and part-time faculty members, for
whom course evaluations are sometimes the sole documented indicator of
job performance.
She is right about the injustice of relying so heavily on a faulty
measure of teaching quality, but that in itself does not mean that
student evaluations of teaching are useless. It just means we need to
use them better. (And, in fact, Schuman does not say we should discard
the evaluations altogether, though she does recommend making them more
accountable by removing students’ anonymity.)
So how can we make evaluations work better to assess and improve our teaching? Here are four ways to start.
1. Don’t make them the only measure of teaching effectiveness.
Because student evaluations are imperfect, they must be supplemented
by other measures that, together, can produce a more reliable picture of
a teacher’s effectiveness. Ideally, we could look at what students can
actually do at the end of a course (or, in educational lingo, use
“valid, direct assessment”). Schuman points to how well her students
could communicate in German by the end of her course. But even such an
assessment does not tell the whole story, because not all of our
courses’ goals are readily measurable after 15 weeks of class. We may
want to wait to pass judgment on an instructor until we know how his or
her students fare in subsequent courses,
or how many get into medical school, or how many become valued
resources in their communities. We could even take the philosopher Solon’s advice to the extreme, and call no one a good teacher until all of her students are dead.
In the meantime, though, we do need to make decisions regarding
faculty evaluation and development. Classroom visits can help us
understand the teacher as a performer and facilitator. Assignments can
tell us about rigor and creativity. Responses to students’ papers,
exams, and lab reports can indicate the teacher’s empathy and ability to
pinpoint how students can improve. Small Group Instructional Diagnosis
can elicit constructive student feedback while filtering out the extreme student voices.
2. Know the capabilities and limitations of the specific evaluation instrument.
Where possible, employ forms that have been shown to be statistically
valid measures of several independent aspects of the instructor and
course. The Student Evaluation of Educational Quality (SEEQ)
is one example. At King’s College, we moved to the SEEQ after an
analysis of our previous instrument showed that it was measuring only
one variable: whether the student liked the class or not. In addition to
measuring students’ perception of the instructor’s enthusiasm,
preparation, and other aspects of his or her teaching, SEEQ also asks
students about the relative pace and workload of the course, revealing
whether they find the course “hard,” and so giving more context to
interpret the raw evaluation scores.
3. Acknowledge that evaluation scores are correlated with students’ expected grades.
Or, perhaps more accurately, acknowledge that they are correlated with
expected grades relative to students’ GPAs. Once you do that, you can
measure the relationship between scores and grades and adjust the scores
accordingly. Teachers whose scores are consistently above the adjusted
mean are doing something that students appreciate, and teachers whose
scores are consistently below the adjusted mean are doing something that
students don’t appreciate. Find out what those things are by talking
with them about their teaching, visiting their classrooms, and reading
their assignments and comments on student work.
And just to head off one avenue of critique, I’ll say that doing
things that students appreciate is not the same as pandering to them. If
students feel valued, if they feel comfortable in a class, if they feel
supported, if they just like being in the class, then several obstacles to their learning are removed, and they have a better chance of success.
4. Don’t leave student evaluation of teaching for the end of the course.
Student evaluations of teaching are useless
if the teacher finds out what students think about the course only
after the course is over. If you want to know what students think about
the course while there is still time to make adjustments, you can ask
them to fill out the evaluation forms at midsemester.
(This should be done anonymously, because while grades are still
unsettled, students’ worries about retribution have more legitimacy.)
The midterm can also be an opportunity to get students to evaluate their
learning, so that they can make changes in the second half of the
course. Evidence indicates that instructors who solicit and respond to such feedback end up with higher end-of-term evaluations.
Student evaluations of teaching do not tell us everything we’d like
to know about ourselves as teachers. And they do permit students to turn
nasty. But they do tell us something. By using them as one
measure of teaching effectiveness, we do not capitulate to the
student-as-consumer model of education. Rather, we put a measure of
faith in our students’ sense (if imperfect) of what is good for them. We
acknowledge that our courses are about their learning and that we care
about how better to enable that.
* Jonathan Malesic is an associate professor of theology and
director of the Center for Excellence in Learning and Teaching at King’s
College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
