The Science of Teacher Evaluation Manipulation

By Amanda Murdie. Hopefully, another semester has come to a close for you and you’re catching up on some much needed research/sleep.   After I’ve doled out grades for my students, I usually get a nice big stack of evaluations of my teaching abilities, filled out by those very same students who squeaked by with a “C-“in my class. At my previous university, it was the ONLY way my teaching was evaluated; for better or worse, no senior faculty or peers ever evaluated my teaching content, style, or skills in the classroom.  A whopping 40% of my annual evaluation came from what my students recorded on bubble-sheets and, occasionally, their written comments. As a social scientist, I have had some general questions about the validity and the reliability of the whole process. Do students really know a good teacher when they see one?  Isn’t this a little bit like letting the inmates evaluate the prison warden?  I was glad to know that there has been a ton written on the topic, some of which has been summarized as implying that student evaluations of instructors are “highly reliable” and “at least moderately valid.”  Others, however, disagree or call for more research. Read more...