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 substantial impact on professors being labeled satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory and excellent vs. non-excellent, and the impact varies substantially depending on the criteria used to classify professors as satisfactory vs. unsatisfactory. Professors teaching quantitative courses are far more likely not to receive tenure, promotion, and/or merit pay when their performance is evaluated against common standards.

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BackgroundConstruction Safety Nova Scotia has started to invest in research on how organizations can better understand and improve their safety culture. Affiliate construction firms have volunteered to undergo a safety culture assessment and a follow-up intervention program designed to address areas of improvement identified in their assessment.ObjectiveBruce Collins, General Manager of Nova Scotia Construction Safety, will discuss his experiences from an ongoing industry-wide safety culture initiative. Bruce will share the successes and challenges of the project and his insight on how to implement a similar initiative in your industry.MethodsGiven the composition of the construction industry (i.e., the majority of firms only have 2–5 employees), a provincial construction safety association, Construction Safety Nova Scotia, is in a prime position to access the network of independent construction firms and help assess their safety culture.FindingsTo date, the project has developed and validated a safety culture assessment, created an industry benchmark for the assessment, and has started industry-wide interventions based on common safety culture themes.ConclusionsBruce will discuss each of the project milestones and conclude with a recommendation for areas of future industry level safety culture research.Policy implicationsRequiring firms to undergo a mandatory safety culture assessments has already been implemented in industries that were early adopters of safety culture research (e.g., nuclear and aviation). In comparison, the construction industry is only in the early stages of safety culture adoption. Offering safety culture assessments to firms that are willing to voluntarily undergo the process is a starting point to build a case for future safety culture assessment requirements.

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