Why and how you should read student evaluations of teaching.

Abstract

If you think student evaluations of teaching (SET) tell you how much students learn from a teacher, get used to disappointment. SET scores are not correlated with learning (Uttl, White, & Gonzalez, 2017), they can create perverse incentives for teachers, and they are biased (Carpenter, Witherby, & Tauber, 2020). Criticisms like these have led some to suggest that SET should be abandoned. I argue that they should not. SET are biased, but most of this bias comes from the students, so there is no unbiased alternative. They do create bad incentives, but they create good incentives as well. Most important, SET measure student opinion. Knowing what the students think is not as good as knowing how good a teacher is, but student opinion does matter. SET are easy to misread, but useful if one knows how to use them. As Mike Tyson said, "It's good to know how to read, but it's dangerous to know how to read and not how to interpret what you're reading." 1 Why should you listen to me? I am a professor of cognitive psychology at Williams College, a liberal arts college that prides itself on good teaching. I recently helped design a new SET form for Williams and I have written about SET before (Kornell & Hausman, 2016). Also, defending SET goes against my own bias: I hate SET. My first year at Williams College, I was shattered by my low ratings. Ten years later, my ratings are average, but like a rat that has been shocked repeatedly, I still freeze when I think about students judging me. Three Shortcomings of SET"The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter." -Winston Churchill 2Other articles have detailed the shortcomings of SET (

Exploring the Problems in Teacher Evaluation Process and Its Perceived Impact on Teacher Performance

“…This topic is a constant contention, particularly in the higher education (Kornell, 2020;2021). Additionally, few experts agree that there are few opportunities for measuring and interpreting problems in how students rate their teachers (Rafiq, Qaisar & Butt, 2022).…”

On students’ (mis)judgments of learning and teaching effectiveness: Where we stand and how to move forward.

“…In our target article, we review the results of studies that raise questions about the validity of student evaluations of teaching as indicators of learning, based on a number of documented biases and a lack of a positive relationship between student ratings of teaching effectiveness and objective measures of learning. A number of commentaries resonated with this notion, and assert that student evaluations of teaching primarily reflect students' satisfaction with their courses and instructors (Boysen, 2020;Finn, 2020;Kornell, 2020).…”

“…Satisfaction ratings fluctuate and can be sensitive to biases, and it is important to consider them in the context of curriculum (e.g., whether the course is required, or whether there is a history of high ratings for the course, regardless of who teaches it, because students enjoy the content). Further, Kornell (2020) notes that student ratings, especially when persistently and chronically low, can be effective for revealing problems with a course or instructor. This is an important point, and it is worth highlighting the fact that even the phantom professors received ratings in the range of average to above average (Reynolds, 1977; Uijtdehaage & O’Neal, 2015).…”

“…A more general notion expressed in the commentaries is the idea that being evaluated could maintain quality assurance and provide motivation for instructors to improve (Boysen, 2020; Finn, 2020; Kornell, 2020; Oppenheimer & Hargis, 2020). What to improve upon depends on the goals of teaching, and we emphasize that student feedback should be carefully interpreted in light of the fact that sometimes goals for learning may not coincide with goals of pleasing students.…”