{"id":736,"date":"2006-10-21T10:51:27","date_gmt":"2006-10-21T10:51:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/21\/new-teaching-evaluation-study\/"},"modified":"2006-10-21T10:51:27","modified_gmt":"2006-10-21T10:51:27","slug":"new-teaching-evaluation-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/10\/21\/new-teaching-evaluation-study\/","title":{"rendered":"New Teaching Evaluation Study"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed<\/cite>, in their “Quick Takes” points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who earn better grades than those in other courses, according to new research from the National Bureau of Economic Research.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

None of that sounds all that shocking, and the abstract of the paper itself<\/a> doesn’t add much more detail. The key sentences would appear to be:<\/p>\n

\n

The findings suggest that subjective teacher evaluations perform well in reflecting an instructor’s influence on students while objective characteristics such as rank and salary do not. Whether an instructor teaches full-time or part-time, does research, has tenure, or is highly paid has no influence on a college student’s grade, likelihood of dropping a course or taking more subsequent courses in the same subject. However, replacing one instructor with another ranked one standard deviation higher in perceived effectiveness increases average grades by 0.5 percentage points, decreases the likelihood of dropping a class by 1.3 percentage points and increases in the number of same-subject courses taken in second and third year by about 4 percent. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Again, nothing really surprising at first glance. It’s well known that tenure and promotion at the large university level have little to do with teaching quality, and much more to do with research productivity, so it’s no shock to find that rank and salary don’t correlate with teaching ability. I’m a little surprised that the grade correlation is so small, but it’s probably harder to really buy good evaluations than conventional wisdom would have it.<\/p>\n

What would be really interesting to me is to see this sort of thing replicated at a small college, where teaching quality is supposed to be more important for tenure and promotion decisions. It’d be harder to get good statistics (because there are fewer students), but it would be interesting to see how well we actually do at rewarding teaching.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside Higher Ed, in their “Quick Takes” points to a new study of teaching evaluations that they summarize thusly: Students care more about teaching quality than professorial rank when evaluating professors, and professors who receive good evaluations from one group of students typically continue to do so in the future, and to have students who… Continue reading New Teaching Evaluation Study<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}