Love ’em or hate ’em, student evaluations of teaching (SETs) are here to stay. Parts one and two of this series explored discussing SETs’ bias in the classroom; here, in the final installment, I offer three not-so-obvious ways to put your students’ feedback to work.
OK, everyone. As I’ve mentioned a few times this semester, we’re going to spend 40 minutes today discussing bias in student evaluations.
You’ve already completed evals for our class (thanks!), but soon your other instructors will begin their end-of-semester campaigns. Incentivizing.
Are you sitting down? Good. Because I have a shocking confession.
For the past few years, I’ve reserved 40 minutes of class time each semester to discuss bias in student evaluations of teaching (SETs) with my students. You know, the ones who are actually
Peter Filene, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, says that “teaching is only as successful as the learning it produces.” Students bring a certain set of expectations, personalities ,and learning dynamics with them at the beginning of
A junior colleague asked me whether teaching for many years made me thicker skinned. They wondered whether reading student evaluations gets easier with time.
I was reminded of an essay by Stephen Marche (2023) on writers and the reviews they receive. Marche recounts the
In the face of a long, protracted pandemic with reports of exhaustion streaming in from all quarters, many educators may feel they were not able to teach as effectively as they would have liked to. This is the perfect time to revisit (or ask anew)
I remember my first year as a tenure-track professor as a nightmare. For reasons I won’t belabor, my teaching stunk. During class, my face was red and hot with humiliation as I fumbled through the content. During lectures, I prayed that no one would ask
Why this article is worth discussing: For those interested in using course evaluation results to improve teaching, this article offers a set of evidence-based recommendations—clearly described and supported with multiple references. The review focuses exclusively on using end-of-course evaluation results for improvement purposes. It covers
Online course evaluations are pretty much the norm now. Fortunately, the switch from in-class to online data collection has generated plenty of research that compares the two. Unfortunately, as is true for course evaluations generally, most faculty and administrators are less cognizant of the research
Many faculty don’t expect to learn a lot from those end-of-course student comments. Students don’t write much, don’t always think carefully about what they write, and have been known to make ugly comments. Low expectations would seem to be justified, and that’s unfortunate. Because they’ve
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