Student evaluations of teaching: teaching quantitative courses can be hazardous to one's career

PeerJ
Bob Uttl, Dylan Smibert

Abstract

Anonymous student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are used by colleges and universities to measure teaching effectiveness and to make decisions about faculty hiring, firing, re-appointment, promotion, tenure, and merit pay. Although numerous studies have found that SETs correlate with various teaching effectiveness irrelevant factors (TEIFs) such as subject, class size, and grading standards, it has been argued that such correlations are small and do not undermine the validity of SETs as measures of professors' teaching effectiveness. However, previous research has generally used inappropriate parametric statistics and effect sizes to examine and to evaluate the significance of TEIFs on personnel decisions. Accordingly, we examined the influence of quantitative vs. non-quantitative courses on SET ratings and SET based personnel decisions using 14,872 publicly posted class evaluations where each evaluation represents a summary of SET ratings provided by individual students responding in each class. In total, 325,538 individual student evaluations from a US mid-size university contributed to theses class evaluations. The results demonstrate that class subject (math vs. English) is strongly associated with SET ratings, has a substa...Continue Reading

References

Dec 11, 2003·Psychological Methods·Charles F BondF Dan Richard
Dec 21, 2013·PloS One·Bob UttlAlain Morin

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Citations

Jun 30, 2018·Medical Education·Michael HesslerManuel Wenk
Nov 9, 2018·Frontiers in Neuroscience·K Jarrod MillmanJean-Baptiste Poline

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Software Mentioned

R
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Math

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